[johnny_canuck]

But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?

In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me.

The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.

[jasonkester]

But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.

But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.

[tardedmeme]

You can buy recipe books at brick and mortar stores, and they're mostly not AI slop yet.

[subscribed]

I'm not going to drive to the bookstore only to find out the recipe I need twice a year is not there because the local cousine doesn't even know the ingredients.

Oh, maybe I should drive to the major city and check several bigger bookstores?

Or order it online? But that would be from the third country because this one is weirdly blind to variety. That will be €20 for a book and some €10 postage.

You're sure I can just get my recipe from the store?

[acron0]

My partner recently bought a receipe book that was probably 100% slop, from the recipes themselvea to the images for each dish.

[soco]

Completely unrelated to AI, I buy and always bought recipe books in second hand bookstores. It has this vintage vibe, and not everything has to be kale. Downside is that some ingredients aren't easily reachable, but it doesn't happen that often.

[ethbr1]

My favorite are 50s and 60s recipe books. They use modern ingredients where appropriate, but mostly basic ingredients.

Later and you start seeing "Use this new processed wunderfood ingredient substitute!" (70s-00s)

[scrame]

I kinda think everyone should have an old school "joy of cooking", where they have instructions on skinning rabbits and squirrels, just as a reference that things weren't always like this not even that long ago.

[specproc]

Totally related to AI. You're gonna be able to spot slop whilst browsing.

Local bookshops are great, use them or lose them.

[yoz-y]

Online grocery shopping service I use has added recipes to their website. Not obvious slop at first reading but then you see stuff like add 600g of carrots and 100ml of water to make a quite watery soup according to the picture.

[ethbr1]

We're already post dead info.

The only solution is to find recipe books that were printed in previous decades.

Which is ironic, given that Google's entire value proposition (to users) was extracting signal from noise...

... and now it's come full A/B-advertising-optimization to being useless at that, when the need is greater than ever.

Imho, Google's greatest failing was missing how its own incentives warped creation of new web content, and failing to account for that strategically -- it turned the web into something it can't itself usefully parse.

[bsenftner]

We have a distinct poverty when it comes to secondary considerations and long term ramifications - which used to be manageable when progress was slower. Now, we're on a very steep acceleration/progress curve, and any shortsighted mistakes cause extremely large ramifications. Which are then compounded by both more short sighted non-fixes and our rapid acceleration/progress curve layering in additional confusion, misunderstandings, omissions of critical information.

[taude]

What kind of insanity are you all talking about? Plenty of cook book authors out there with good recipes, tested, big-personal brand, etc. no need to go to prior decades for good books.

[tardedmeme]

How do you know which ones are good?

[emayljames]

You don't need butter to make cake, it ends up lighter and softer without it

[jasonkester]

You need to compensate for not adding it though. The recipe without was literally the same ingredient list as the site it copied, just missing a line.

And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.

[subscribed]

LOL, that's some confident pan-cake misinformation.

[tremon]

> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?

No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, because that one monopolist is able to squeeze both consumers and suppliers to the detriment of both.

[brookst]

Do you think Walmart’s prices are higher than you’d pay if there were just ten competing stores with the same product mix, each of which did not have the leverage to squeeze suppliers?

[tremon]

It doesn't matter what Walmart's prices would be -- because there'd be nine alternatives offering their products at different price points. Also, you seem to be implying that suppliers are inhuman and deserve to be squeezed (but Walmart somehow deserves all the wealth it extracts as a middle-man, go figure), which is exactly why I said that focusing on consumers only is a myopic view of the world.

[miltonlost]

Please please please learn the basics of monopolies.

[brookst]

While I appreciate the condescension, tell me how Walmart is a monopoly?

[redsparrow]

Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.

It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...

[bbondo]

> people aren't going to publish recipes

Sure they are. I can attest that musicians will gladly publish their music even when no recompense is offered. Surely culinary artists are the same.

[nicbou]

Some people will. The vast majority won’t. You are not playing for an audience, only for crawlers, so what is the point?

[mrighele]

Those who won’t were doing it for the money. Those who continue are those who do it for passion, or those whose recipe is just a way to attract people to their business (e.g. kitchenware company). I don’t think it is necessarily bad, the quantity will decrease but the quality may even improve

[RyanHamilton]

I built a passion reference site. A large part of that passion came from knowing and talking to the people I was helping. One person emailing or saying thanks would later help power me through to create more useful articles. Enriching openai/claude/ms/google and no thanks from an individual, has disincentivized me from writing more.

[nicbou]

Same here. People knew the website and it was immensely flattering to meet users in the wild. It motivated me to really sweat the small stuff, because people noticed. Now I'm just feeding the slop machine, and it feels pointless.

[the_af]

> Those who continue are those who do it for passion

Nothing kills passion faster than your only audience being an AI crawler.

[grantj]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ

[gwbas1c]

We just won't get countless recipe websites where you have to scroll, scroll, scroll through slop about someone's day to read a scraped recipe that every other website has.

This is just disruption.

[nicbou]

Does the current Google search results indicate that they will be any different?

It’s also not disruption if your product relies on the output of the industry it kills. What will AI train on when it destroys the economics of sharing information with others?

[gwbas1c]

> your product relies on the output of the industry it kills

I disagree, Google doesn't rely on a massive amount of recipe websites; they rely on Google and exploit it.

More importantly: These recipes exist from many sources, not just the website that exploited Google to be first in their rankings.

[nicbou]

From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

In this instance, the internet is more than top-ranking recipe websites.

[Ar-Curunir]

No, because now Google controls entirely what you see. They could decide to show you the recipe after all.

Also, at some point even the ad-laden websites will die, and then Googles sources will be extinguished.

[Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe]

> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?

No because it's killing competition and becoming an even more obvious monopoly. Then at any occasion they have to choose between consumers and profits, they'll do what shareholders want and increase profits.

[mcphage]

> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right?

No. Temporarily it’s good for the consumer. Ultimately it is bad for the consumer, because as prices drop, so to does quality.

[itsmek]

It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.

[goosejuice]

You can find many ad free recipes in the cookbooks at your local library. They're likely of higher quality as well.

[steveBK123]

Not really good for consumers in the long term. Creates a monopsony (monopoly on the buyer side instead of seller side) in the supply chain, with all the same negative externalities to competition.

Same reason its not good to have a "company town" where 1 company is the major employer to 50% of the workers.

[gosub100]

Not even the summary of the recipe, I think a lot of the "value" AI provides is decluttering the interface. All these perverse incentives conspire to make it undesirable for web publishers to simply show you a cake recipe. They need to meet SEO metrics for being higher on googles index, they need to monetize with ad and chum boxes. They need to distract and dazzle your senses. In the end, AI strips all these anti patterns out and shows you the meat. Or the "summary" of what should have been there all along. The "AI" isn't learning about what the words mean, it's stripping out cruft and filler that was deliberately added!

I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, but I'm saying if you had a magic browser add-on that simply stripped the BS out and showed you the relevant content, it would meet the use cases of the majority of people using AI (regarding search).

Said differently, Google are bringing you a solution to a problem they (largely) created.

[byzantinegene]

except this isn't a solution. taking away sources just creates another problem down the road. there's no information to crawl from if no one is building websites to crawl from.