Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake: the Horrors of AI Recipes

Remember those halcyon days before the AI fever pitch when playing around with things like neural networks were fun instead of somewhat terrifying? They were an amusing curiosity circa 2017 especially because their output was so absurd that no one could possibly take them seriously. Before it collapsed under shoddy AI-generated content, BuzzFeed covered the work of Janelle Shane, a researcher who fed recipes to neural networks and recorded their wacky output. This included such abominations as…

My personal favorite that inspired the headline, Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake, is as follows:

Ingredients:
-2 cups all purpose flour
- teaspoon salt
-1 cup of dark brown sugar
-2 eggs
-1 teaspoon vanilla extract
-2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- cup milk or other liquid if needed (it will make the cake softer if it is too warm)
-1 large chicken. Mix all ingredients and refrigerate for 30 minutes or overnight. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

-Gather the chicken by holding it by the top and both sides with both hands, just like you do to make meatloaf, then gently pop it into the casserole. Bake for 40 minutes or until chicken is cooked through.

-Let the cake cool completely before eating,

Delicious!

Anyway, as these things are wont to do, this application of AI has evolved since then. A few weeks ago, I was scrolling and an image caught my eye. There was something… off about it.

I paused and looked at it for a moment. I was convinced there was something a little too-too about the textures and how everything looked just a scootch over-saturated. Granted, I have spent a bit too much time looking at AI-generated images, so there’s a real chance this is a all-things-look-like-nails-to-a-hammer thing, but I clicked through to see the recipe. And hey, was finding it in a Facebook group like “AI Recipes must be stopped” a dead give-away about its nature? Sure, but when I read the recipe itself, I got a slight sinking feeling.

Orange Dreamsicle Salad Don’t Lose This
Ingredients:
1 box orange Jell-O
1 box instant vanilla pudding
1 cup boiling water
1/2 cup cold water
1 Cool Whip 8 oz.
1 can mandarin oranges 14 oz. , drained
1 cup mini marshmallows
Instructions:
In a large bowl combine orange Jell-O and boiling water.
Whisk until Jell-o is dissolved.
Add cold water and allow to chill for 15 minutes in refrigerator.
Slowly whisk in vanilla pudding mix until smooth and chill for another 15-20 minutes or until it becomes slightly thickened.
Fold in Cool Whip, mandarin oranges and marshmallows

There are a few things that could be potential tells, but I’m far from a culinary expert. Adding cold water to hot jello and then adding vanilla pudding mix seems pretty off to me, but what do I know? Maybe that’s what you do if you want to mix pudding and Jello. Scrolling down, I felt a little better because there were some comfortingly fake entries:

I was relieved, at least partially. Thank goodness there’s still some obvious flubs in AI content. I’m not so foolish as to think I can’t be fooled, but it struck me how far this has all come from Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake. Yes, peppermints on nachos is a wildly implausible thing, but we now live in a world where an AI-generated Jello salad didn’t immediately strike as fake. That’s progress. And while it’s obviously not a perfected science, AI-generated recipes are out there. They don’t make good-tasting food, they can be deadly, and suggest poison sandwiches, but that hasn’t stopped a big proliferation of AI recipe-generators from happening.

As with AI-generated images, the question of “why” comes up; why are we so desperate to build a machine for something we can as easily do for ourselves? There are already recipes in books and on the very accessible internet! Do you have to scroll through someone’s slice of life story and dissertation on like, pink sea salt before you can read the fucking recipe? Yeah, probably! But it’s there and it’s free. Are we really so lazy that we can’t find the easily found human-created recipes that are already out there? Is the thought that software generates them for you really worth the gamble? At least with AI images, I can grasp the outline of misguided convenience-logic; it’s quick and easy for a non-artist to make “art.” I know we here in America elected a guy who’s putting a raving lunatic with a worm in his head and a fondness for animal carcasses in charge of Health and Human Services, but certainly we can see the folly in letting AI make our recipes. Googling recipes isn’t hard. They’re on the internet where you’re reading this right now!