Comment on Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’
MudMan@fedia.io 3 days ago
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Please do not use recipes from AI summaries without clicking through to the correct amounts.
I mean, hell, I won't use a recipe I find on a recipe site without cross-referencing at least a couple other recipes from other sites, because some of those are janky as hell. But the best-guess of a summarization LLM on what all those numbers and ratios are meant to be? Yeah, no. Not by itself at all, unless you're just trying to jog your memory on something you already know and can recognize the correct values if you see them.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 days ago
A couple of decades back, I was editing a column with a recipe that lacked the unit for salt. This was on deadline, so I deduced from where it was compared with other ingredients that it was 1/4 cup.
Now, no reasonable person is going to use 1/4 cup of salt in anything on a household scale. But I wasn’t really having my cooking hat on, and the proofer didn’t catch it.
The number of complaints we got was somewhat comical. “Too salty; inedible,” usw.
It of course called for 1/4 tsp.
MudMan@fedia.io 3 days ago
Hah. Shocked that you didn't just take the easy way out and wrote "salt to taste".
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 days ago
It was between the flour and the water, so while one could sprinkle salt on at the end, it seemed central to the process.