The holidays are looming over us like a thunderhead full of acid rain. It’s that time of year when societal obligation forces you into a confined space with people sharing your DNA but none of your interests, all centered around the ritual sacrifice of a flightless bird. The pressure is on. You have to perform. You have to provide sustenance that doesn’t result in a mass casualty event or a trip to the emergency room. Naturally, in our infinite laziness, we turn to the glowing rectangle in our pockets for guidance. We ask the oracle for a way to roast a turkey without burning the house down.
And that, my friends, is where the horror story begins.
Let me pour a drink. Hold on. The bottle is right here—cheap bourbon, the kind that burns the lies out of your throat. Good. The warmth hits the stomach, and the world makes a little more sense.
So, here’s the setup. Bloomberg, a publication usually reserved for people who care about the fluctuating price of pork bellies, just dropped a report that feels more like a script for a dystopian comedy. Food bloggers—those people who usually write 2,000 words about the way the autumn light hits a mason jar before giving you a cookie recipe—are screaming into the void. They’re warning us that the internet is currently being flooded with AI-generated “slop.”
That’s the word they’re using. Slop. It’s perfect. It sounds exactly like what it is. A gray, formless sludge of information, chewed up by a server farm in a desert somewhere and vomited onto your screen.
The issue is simple: people are Googling recipes for Thanksgiving, and the AI Overviews—those little helpful summaries at the top of the search result—are telling people to do insane things. We’re talking about instructions that defy physics, chemistry, and basic human decency.
We’ve got AI telling home cooks to bake a Christmas cake for three to four hours. Four hours. You know what you get after baking a cake for four hours? You get a carbon brick. You get a weapon. You don’t get dessert; you get a structural element you can use to shore up a crumbling foundation. There are reports of cookie recipes that result in “cloying lumps of sugar” because the algorithm doesn’t understand the chemical reaction between flour, butter, and heat. It just knows those words usually hang out together.
It’s hilarious until you realize someone is actually going to serve this garbage to their unsuspecting grandmother.
The kicker is that none of this is surprising. Not even a little bit. We’ve handed over the keys to the library of human knowledge to a glorified autocomplete function that has never tasted a strawberry. Think about it. These Large Language Models have never felt hunger. They’ve never burnt the roof of their mouth on hot pizza. They don’t know that too much salt makes you gag or that undercooked chicken turns your intestines into a slip-n-slide of misery. They deal in tokens, not taste buds.
Yet, here we are, trusting a disembodied brain to tell us how to feed our biological bodies. It’s the blind leading the hungry off a cliff.
Google, in their infinite corporate wisdom, released a statement that is a masterclass in deflection. They called their AI tool a “helpful starting point.” A starting point? Telling me to use glue to make cheese stick to a pizza—yeah, that happened a while back—isn’t a starting point. It’s an assassination attempt. They claim they want to help users discover useful sites, implying that the reason we’re all turning to this AI garbage is that food blogs are too “cluttered.”
Now, let’s be honest. We’ve all complained about food blogs. You just want to know how many eggs go in the batter, and you have to scroll past a ten-page essay about the author’s husband’s tennis elbow and the way the smell of nutmeg reminds her of a quaint bed and breakfast in Vermont. It’s annoying. I get it. I hate it too. When I want a drink, I don’t want the bartender to tell me about his childhood; I want him to pour the booze.
But here’s the twisted irony: I would take the tennis elbow story over the AI hallucination any day of the week. At least the woman writing about Vermont actually baked the damn pie. She tasted it. She knows if it tastes like sawdust. The clutter was the price we paid for human verification. Now, we’ve stripped away the humanity to get to the “facts” faster, only to realize the facts are lies fabricated by a machine that is functionally insane.
The real tragedy here isn’t just the bad food. It’s the destruction of the ecosystem. The people who actually know how to cook—the ones doing the testing, buying the groceries, sweating over the stove—are losing their livelihoods. Their traffic is tanking because the search engine is scraping their content, putting it in a blender, and serving it up as a unrecognizable summary.
Carrie Forest, who runs a site called Clean Eating Kitchen, told Bloomberg that we’re heading toward a future where “AI is just talking to itself.”
Let that sink in while I refill this glass. The ice is melting, diluting the good stuff.
“AI acting alone.” That’s the Dead Internet Theory coming to life. It’s a snake eating its own tail, but the snake is made of binary code and the tail tastes like burning plastic. The AI scrapes other AI content, summarizes it, hallucinates new details, publishes it, and then another AI scrapes that. It’s a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, fading into illegibility.
We are watching the gentrification of the internet, where the quirky, messy, human shops are being bulldozed to make room for a sterile, automated superstore that sells poison.
But let’s bring this back to your dinner table. Let’s talk about the practical application of this disaster.
Picture it. Thursday afternoon. You’ve been drinking since noon because your uncle is talking about chemtrails again. You’re in the kitchen, staring at the bird. You pull up a recipe that Google’s helpful little robot curated for you. It tells you to roast the turkey at 600 degrees for forty-five minutes.
You, being a modern human who has outsourced your critical thinking to the cloud, say, “Well, the machine knows best.” You crank the oven. Smoke alarms go off. The skin of the turkey turns into obsidian. The inside is still raw, teeming with salmonella.
You serve it. The family gathers. Grandma takes a bite and breaks a denture. Your cousin takes a bite and spends the next three days in the bathroom praying for death.
Or maybe it’s the sides. Maybe the AI suggests adding a cup of bleach to the mashed potatoes to keep them white. Who knows? The algorithm doesn’t know the difference between “bleach” and “milk” in terms of nutritional value; it just knows they are both white liquids often found in households.
The absurdity is delicious, even if the food isn’t.
And the kicker is, we deserve it. We wanted convenience. We didn’t want to buy a cookbook. We didn’t want to call our mothers and ask how to make the stuffing. We didn’t want to read the blog post about the autumn leaves. We wanted the data, stripped of context, delivered instantly. We treated knowledge like fast food, and now we’re getting food poisoning.
There is something profoundly sad about the “recipe slop” destroying the businesses of independent creators. These are people trying to make a living in the digital gig economy, and they are being crushed by the very tools that were supposed to “democratize” information. It’s the same old song. The little guy does the work, the big machine steals the product, grinds it up, and sells it back to the masses as a cheap imitation.
It makes me want to throw my laptop out the window and go live in a cave. But caves don’t have Wi-Fi, and I need to check the sports scores.
So what’s the solution? How do we survive this culinary apocalypse?
The article suggests making sure a recipe is “human-tested.” That’s a low bar, isn’t it? “Certified Edible by a Mammal.” That should be a sticker on every website now.
My advice? Stop trusting the summary. Click the damn link. Scroll past the story about the husband’s tennis elbow. Look for the grime. Look for the grease stains. If a recipe looks too clean, too perfect, too algorithmic, run away. If the photo looks like it was generated by a computer—where the turkey has five legs and the corn on the cob is melting into the tablecloth—don’t cook it.
Better yet, buy a book. A physical book made of paper. One written by a person who liked to drink wine and eat butter. Julia Child never told anyone to put glue in the sauce. Anthony Bourdain never suggested turning a cake into a doorstop.
There is a soul in cooking. It’s about heat and time and love and anger. It’s about trying to feed people so they shut up and smile for five minutes. An AI can’t replicate that. It can only simulate the syntax of a recipe.
We are standing on the precipice of a world where we don’t know what is real and what is just a statistical probability of a sentence. And this Thanksgiving, that probability might just give you the runs.
The glass is empty again. That’s the problem with writing about this stuff; it makes you thirsty. It makes you realize how fragile our grip on reality really is. We are one bad search query away from poisoning our loved ones.
It paints a troubling picture, doesn’t it? A slop-dominated future. A world where we are fed gray goo by machines that don’t care if we live or die.
But hey, look on the bright side. If the AI ruins the dinner, really destroys it, turns the turkey into a biological weapon and the pie into a hazardous waste site… at least you won’t have to wash the dishes. You can just burn the house down and start over. And honestly, with the way things are going, that might be the most sensible recipe of all.
Cheers.
Source: Thanksgiving Dinner Headed for Tragedy as Disastrous AI Recipes Devour Internet