Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Last year, as an experiment, I baked cakes from recipes generated by ChatGPT and Bard. It went better than I expected — because much of each recipe didn’t seem created by AI at all.

The recipes I got were eerily familiar to recipes I’ve seen on food blogs or Instagram. They’d been slightly changed, and only Bard (now called Gemini) bothered offering attribution, linking to a recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. In some ways, this isn’t a new problem; I’ve seen far too many copied non-AI recipes floating around the internet. AI, though, makes the ethics of recipe copying more fraught. Its sheer scale threatens to create a world where human recipe developers are crowded out by semi-randomized AI-generated competition, but while there…

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