Platforms are finally recognizing that people don’t want to consume AI slop. A growing number of sites and apps now have tools and policies to flag, label, and ban AI-generated content.
I think all Ai content on the web or on YouTube is trash and has no value. But I use chat gpt daily to ask questions and get answers quickly. That part is good. The rest is awful.
I started asking it for recepies in the last month or so, and it’s been very useful for giving new recepies and making it easier to try new dishes. Before this I used to rotate the same 20 recepies all the time. Got very boring.
You’re gonna get downvoted to hell - but may I suggest use a better search engine and find good websites to bookmark, like we’ve done for 25+ years already, instead of destroying the planet and handing over everything to authoritarian billionaires?
Kagi. Ecosia. Searxng. hell, DDG.
Kagi has an AWESOME recipes feature. Well worth the $5 a month I pay. Kagi honestly improved my life quality way more than I Imagined.
Sure, if you’ve been a normie using chrome with no adblock and google for searching, the gibbity is going to look better to you. Get educated and learn of alternatives and you’ll see how shitty the gibbity is. Not to mention, you have maybe a year or two before you’ll need a subscription for any tokens to get those recipes that gibbity blatantly stole with 0 repercussions, because the compute cost is through the roof. Just don’t.
I mostly used ChatGPT to learn about myself/sense of self - like my thinking and problem solving processes (I’m neurodivergent). I test out the things that it says and it’s pretty accurate. My metacognition is very high now. I can actually describe how I think and where (and why) I get stuck. It suggested another program to use to fill in the gaps for me. And because I know exactly how I think, I’ve been able to complete personal projects that I couldn’t complete before. And I no longer get stuck because I know exactly what my brain is trying to do and so I can lead myself. Being nd is annoying because common advice for most things doesn’t make sense for me and I can’t ask people to help me because my thinking processes are so different from theirs. But this is no longer a problem for me. Technology for the win.
I actually just posted about this. Folks using chatbots for sounding boards. Dangerous territory.
Watch out for your brain. You’re eroding it.
Do you think your metacognition is “very high” because the gibbity told you it is? Interesting how it tells you exactly what you want to hear. Almost as if it’s programmed for mass addiction. Huh.
It told me what my thinking patterns are and told me what it’s called - I’m a bottom up thinker. Looking at my historical data the framework fits and I use the framework today and it works. The framework keeps me oriented. How’s my brain eroding? Before learning the framework I was just lost and confused because I didn’t know how to structure my thoughts, now that I understand how I think I can lead myself without relying on ai.
Why is using chatbots for ideas dangerous territory if you test out everything it suggests and do research outside of ai on anything that you choose to upgrade to a principle?
I think ChatGPT specifically is terrible. Please, use any LLM but OpenAI. Literally any other one.
OP’s example of cooking is also a horrible use case, especially if it’s scraping the web for those SEO recipe sites. It’s literally randomizing and mixing spam.
But I found LLMs to be great tools to assist with neurodivergence struggles, for introspection and things like that. Local models helped me, significantly.
But you have to stay cognizant that you are just using a tool, a mirror of yourself basically.
It’s not mixing spam. It comes up with great recepies that are perfectly seasoned and taste great. Sounds like you never tried it and you are projecting your dislike for AI on something you don’t know.
I get that a lot of people on Lemmy don’t like Ai but come on, we shouldn’t lie about stuff it actually does well. I think it has a few very good usecases and this is one. Free recepies that work well.
I think you’re misunderstanding them. They specifically mentioned SEO recipe sites, which are websites dedicated to being ranked highest on search engines, which typically means they don’t correlate with recipe quality, but with clickability (or whatever the algorithms like today). There’s a lot of them, so calling them spam isn’t necessarily wrong. Lots of people search for recipes, so it’s bound to attract it.
They just seem to be cautioning that the LLM might pull from bogus sources since there’s not really a straightforward benchmark for a good recipe that it might reference, and that you have to remember you’re using a tool. Your own intelligence is the real test. Which isn’t bad advice when dealing with AI output, but I think you already got that. I would say, don’t be baited into the idea that everyone is some hardcore AI hater because they are skeptical, there are certainly some, but assuming it alienates the many people that have surprisingly nuanced takes.
Yeah good points. I dont know where it gets its raw data but it’s capable of modifying and thinking about ingredients, so I think its behavior is superior to just recepie sites.
LLMs are text models. They’re like weather models; they live in the context of the input, it’s literally their entire “world view.” The inputs are the most important part of the quality of the answer.
You need to be able to audit the inputs. If ChatGPT doesn’t even show them, that is a tremendous issue.
And I don’t mean to criticize recipes it’s given that have turned out well, but that’s, literally, mathematically, objectively, a roll of the dice if it’s not grounded in real recipes.
As an alternative, I would highly recommend:
Asking the LLM service to find the most accredited cookbooks in the niche you want.
Get them locally, copy and paste the categories you want into chat.
Ask it to pick or (or modify/synthesize) a good recipe from that.
This is what text models were designed to do before OpenAI commercialized them.
See, this is where I think you’re wrong. There’s no thinking going on. It’s a probability analysis based on word adjacency in a text dataset, with a little bit of $RND thrown in. If you ask the same question multiple times, you’ll get different answers because of the presence of the random seed. If you ask it why chocolate coated shrimp is a bad idea, it’s not going to answer based on culinary training saying that those two flavour profiles don’t belong together, it’s going to say no because some other crazy person actually tried it and that data made it into the dataset. (And yes, someone did, I checked…)
This is why people who don’t know how computing works should be banned from touching anything LLM adjacent. The amount of misinformation makes me pull my hair out. Even them calling it “AI” is idiotic and I correct anyone using the term. It’s a word generator. Or if you will, a bullshit generator built on stolen knowledge then sold back to you as slop.
Then you have me pegged wrong. I’ve been running local LLMs since 2022.
But this is what ChatGPT likely does, under the hood:
When you ask it for recipes, it goes to Google and searches for them.
It dumps the top results into its context… the same SEO spam you are using your chat to avoid, I’d presume.
It then averages that with its own amalgamated knowledge to “improvise” a recipe. It’s not thinking through the logic and physics of cooking or referencing a cookbook, it’s just taking a guess at what sounds like a plausible recipe written out.
On top of that, line by line, every measurement, every ingredient, every step is also pseudo randomized; there’s a chance it may pick 8 oz for some ingredient, or 16 oz of another. It’s a roll of the dice. That’s how LLM sampling works.
Outside the thinking block, it also has no way to go back and correct itself if one of those randomized measurements it’s obviously wrong; it just goes with it, like an improv actor.
So…That’s just a computer randomized recipe.
It may work, it’s not bad necessarily, but you have no idea if it’ll work or not until you assess it and try it yourself.
So what’s the point?
What’s the reason for doing it?
There’s no advantage over a real cookbook, where at least the actual recipe has been assembled, eaten, and enjoyed enough to be deemed worthy of inclusion by the author. ChatGPT does no such thing unless it finds real cookbooks to reference.
Now, if you feed it real cookbooks into the context (or use some built in feature that does so), and ask it “pick me a recipe I would like. Modify it.”
That’s fine!
That’s right up an LLM’s alley.
But you can’t feed it SEO spam and expect something good out. Garbage in, garbage out is the term data scientists use.
This is what I try to emphasize every time I talk about LLMs. They have to be machines you understand the inputs and outputs of, not a black box you can trust to give you reliable info when you don’t know how it gets it.
On a separate note, I really, really hate OpenAI. I think they are a pyramid scheme.
I always suggest using literally any LLM but ChatGPT. Literally any one. Ideally an open weights one, but please, just not ChatGPT for so many reasons…
Not sure why you’re getting the downvotes. Your comment is educated and makes sense. I’m still against the use of LLM’s based on the fact they are pure theft, owned by billionaires, and destroying the earth, but I do agree, at least use it correctly and use the correct tool. If all information was paid for, all data centers owned by the public, completely transparent on the info they contain, and ran completely on renewable energy, there’d be nothing really wrong with the tech (other than creating slop that destroyed the internet and eroded trust in everything, which is a massive downside).
… Though I’m personally more forgiving Apache-licensed, open weights models trained on peanuts.
Ripping out the commercial aspect and intensity of training nullifies out a whole lot of issues, just like open source code does, even if the models are still problematic (just like a lot of open source code/projects are problematic).
I’m also of the opinion that massive LLM proliferation exacerbated the cracks in internet and institutions that were already there. They were already in trouble, but all this just made it glaringly obvious.
ChatGPT and others have a ~ 90% and more hallucination rate on questions it wasnt trained on. You’re playing a game of luck using gpt and others for knowledge that you’re not verifying by source.
Somewhat tailored response per your username: Anything the ministry of truth decides should not be part of the training set.
But more generally, even in things like neurodivergence, lots of questions you could ask that would be in the bounds of “guesstimation” by professionals. The problem is these LLM will spout pure utter highly-believably-confident snake oil with the tiniest little legal microscopic fineprint on the side of the html webpage that you can never scroll to saying “AI responses can be wrong”.
For me, the mere fact that you have a nicely worded source of information that, depending if you’re lucky with your question, is pure scientific fact, or utter maddening bullshit, makes me terrified to use it.
The warnings are prominently displayed and I’m sorry but we can’t just toss tech out because some people are stupid. I get wrong answers from professionals, too.
For me, I just got used to it being “mostly” correct. Im not betting my life on these things. I use them for recepies and im not putting poison in my food if it would say so. :)
Funny you should use that example, because a farmer destroyed twenty five acres of food crops by poisoning them because an AI told him to (thankfully killing the plants before they could end up on someone’s plate…)
BTW, not to pick on you, but it’s “recipes”, not “recepies”.
I think the best use case for AI is the initial search phase. Using AI to create news articles, code, music, videos, etc is just slop. But asking a question and getting a starting place can be helpful. I consider AI to be the modern version of the search engine.
Just be very aware that these models make shit up all the time. So asking a factual question needs to be reviewed before trusting the answer. Otherwise you get those glue pizzas.
I can deal with an ai being wrong because an ai is not malicious. It may be programmed a way but it’s not directly trying to screw me.
You’re right, but it’s working with data from people who might be, and because it cooks it all down you can’t be sure of the origins of that data. There’s an entire industry popping up now to “lean” AI answers in “approved” directions. It’s SEO optimization, for AI answers.
I treat “AI” like an overhyped, incredibly-energy-inefficient search engine. I check every citation it makes, every time. Sometimes this is better than a straight search, sometimes it’s not. But the main thing is that EVERY result is treated as untrustworthy by default. If a boring search engine result persistently sent me to the same site written by a human, and I found the results worthwhile, that site (and the responsible human) would build trust over time and I’d do less checking. But with AI you’re constantly dealing with the “data slurry”, so no trust is (or ever should be) built. You’re starting from scratch, every time.
It’s generating recepies. So you can say you want certain ingredients and you don’t like others, ask it to make a list of stuff you could try, and you will get that. Also, you can ask it during cooking exactly how to cut the pieces for best result, or if you want something more spicy and so on. It’s much better than a static recepie. This is more like being able to talk about a dish and adjust it according to your taste, replace certain ingredients if you like, and so on.
Im using it daily and prefer it very much to browsing recepie sites.
Okay, you’re using it was a random number generator and search engine. That’s fine. I’d be concerned if someone used it to create recipes… and for the record, I’d be just as distrustful of a person who has never cooked in their lives suggesting recipe modifications, too.
What difference does that make? You need to know the basics and you need to use critical thinking. Making new recipes is just trial and error. ChatGPT just gives suggestions. If it suggests something you’ve never heard of you double check it using a reputable resource.
We don’t hate the technology. We hate that people who have zero idea how computing works think they are being so unique by boiling our oceans so they can put glue on pizza. If people were slightly less lazy pieces of shit with any morals, they’d find a way to cook without enabling the downfall of humanity. But humans are idiots, and are going to take the easiest path possible, instead of using tools we’ve had for decades.
If we had more autistic folks with a strong sense of justice, we’d be a lot better off.
Man say what you will about chatGPT recipies. All im gonna say is that since adding PVA to my pizza toppings my cheese has stayed exactly where it should!
I think all Ai content on the web or on YouTube is trash and has no value. But I use chat gpt daily to ask questions and get answers quickly. That part is good. The rest is awful.
I started asking it for recepies in the last month or so, and it’s been very useful for giving new recepies and making it easier to try new dishes. Before this I used to rotate the same 20 recepies all the time. Got very boring.
You’re gonna get downvoted to hell - but may I suggest use a better search engine and find good websites to bookmark, like we’ve done for 25+ years already, instead of destroying the planet and handing over everything to authoritarian billionaires?
Kagi. Ecosia. Searxng. hell, DDG.
Kagi has an AWESOME recipes feature. Well worth the $5 a month I pay. Kagi honestly improved my life quality way more than I Imagined.
Sure, if you’ve been a normie using chrome with no adblock and google for searching, the gibbity is going to look better to you. Get educated and learn of alternatives and you’ll see how shitty the gibbity is. Not to mention, you have maybe a year or two before you’ll need a subscription for any tokens to get those recipes that gibbity blatantly stole with 0 repercussions, because the compute cost is through the roof. Just don’t.
I have kagi but didn’t know about their recepies. Will check it out :)
And I dont worry about downvotes. I will write what I feel even if it’s not popular. :)
Yeah there is a recipe specific switch for kagi. it’s great
I mostly used ChatGPT to learn about myself/sense of self - like my thinking and problem solving processes (I’m neurodivergent). I test out the things that it says and it’s pretty accurate. My metacognition is very high now. I can actually describe how I think and where (and why) I get stuck. It suggested another program to use to fill in the gaps for me. And because I know exactly how I think, I’ve been able to complete personal projects that I couldn’t complete before. And I no longer get stuck because I know exactly what my brain is trying to do and so I can lead myself. Being nd is annoying because common advice for most things doesn’t make sense for me and I can’t ask people to help me because my thinking processes are so different from theirs. But this is no longer a problem for me. Technology for the win.
I actually just posted about this. Folks using chatbots for sounding boards. Dangerous territory.
Watch out for your brain. You’re eroding it.
Do you think your metacognition is “very high” because the gibbity told you it is? Interesting how it tells you exactly what you want to hear. Almost as if it’s programmed for mass addiction. Huh.
It told me what my thinking patterns are and told me what it’s called - I’m a bottom up thinker. Looking at my historical data the framework fits and I use the framework today and it works. The framework keeps me oriented. How’s my brain eroding? Before learning the framework I was just lost and confused because I didn’t know how to structure my thoughts, now that I understand how I think I can lead myself without relying on ai.
Why is using chatbots for ideas dangerous territory if you test out everything it suggests and do research outside of ai on anything that you choose to upgrade to a principle?
+1 for this.
Well, qualified:
I think ChatGPT specifically is terrible. Please, use any LLM but OpenAI. Literally any other one.
OP’s example of cooking is also a horrible use case, especially if it’s scraping the web for those SEO recipe sites. It’s literally randomizing and mixing spam.
But I found LLMs to be great tools to assist with neurodivergence struggles, for introspection and things like that. Local models helped me, significantly.
But you have to stay cognizant that you are just using a tool, a mirror of yourself basically.
It’s not mixing spam. It comes up with great recepies that are perfectly seasoned and taste great. Sounds like you never tried it and you are projecting your dislike for AI on something you don’t know.
I get that a lot of people on Lemmy don’t like Ai but come on, we shouldn’t lie about stuff it actually does well. I think it has a few very good usecases and this is one. Free recepies that work well.
I think you’re misunderstanding them. They specifically mentioned SEO recipe sites, which are websites dedicated to being ranked highest on search engines, which typically means they don’t correlate with recipe quality, but with clickability (or whatever the algorithms like today). There’s a lot of them, so calling them spam isn’t necessarily wrong. Lots of people search for recipes, so it’s bound to attract it.
They just seem to be cautioning that the LLM might pull from bogus sources since there’s not really a straightforward benchmark for a good recipe that it might reference, and that you have to remember you’re using a tool. Your own intelligence is the real test. Which isn’t bad advice when dealing with AI output, but I think you already got that. I would say, don’t be baited into the idea that everyone is some hardcore AI hater because they are skeptical, there are certainly some, but assuming it alienates the many people that have surprisingly nuanced takes.
Yeah good points. I dont know where it gets its raw data but it’s capable of modifying and thinking about ingredients, so I think its behavior is superior to just recepie sites.
That’s not how it works.
LLMs are text models. They’re like weather models; they live in the context of the input, it’s literally their entire “world view.” The inputs are the most important part of the quality of the answer.
You need to be able to audit the inputs. If ChatGPT doesn’t even show them, that is a tremendous issue.
And I don’t mean to criticize recipes it’s given that have turned out well, but that’s, literally, mathematically, objectively, a roll of the dice if it’s not grounded in real recipes.
As an alternative, I would highly recommend:
Asking the LLM service to find the most accredited cookbooks in the niche you want.
Get them locally, copy and paste the categories you want into chat.
Ask it to pick or (or modify/synthesize) a good recipe from that.
This is what text models were designed to do before OpenAI commercialized them.
See, this is where I think you’re wrong. There’s no thinking going on. It’s a probability analysis based on word adjacency in a text dataset, with a little bit of $RND thrown in. If you ask the same question multiple times, you’ll get different answers because of the presence of the random seed. If you ask it why chocolate coated shrimp is a bad idea, it’s not going to answer based on culinary training saying that those two flavour profiles don’t belong together, it’s going to say no because some other crazy person actually tried it and that data made it into the dataset. (And yes, someone did, I checked…)
This is why people who don’t know how computing works should be banned from touching anything LLM adjacent. The amount of misinformation makes me pull my hair out. Even them calling it “AI” is idiotic and I correct anyone using the term. It’s a word generator. Or if you will, a bullshit generator built on stolen knowledge then sold back to you as slop.
Then you have me pegged wrong. I’ve been running local LLMs since 2022.
But this is what ChatGPT likely does, under the hood:
When you ask it for recipes, it goes to Google and searches for them.
It dumps the top results into its context… the same SEO spam you are using your chat to avoid, I’d presume.
It then averages that with its own amalgamated knowledge to “improvise” a recipe. It’s not thinking through the logic and physics of cooking or referencing a cookbook, it’s just taking a guess at what sounds like a plausible recipe written out.
On top of that, line by line, every measurement, every ingredient, every step is also pseudo randomized; there’s a chance it may pick 8 oz for some ingredient, or 16 oz of another. It’s a roll of the dice. That’s how LLM sampling works.
Outside the thinking block, it also has no way to go back and correct itself if one of those randomized measurements it’s obviously wrong; it just goes with it, like an improv actor.
So…That’s just a computer randomized recipe.
It may work, it’s not bad necessarily, but you have no idea if it’ll work or not until you assess it and try it yourself.
So what’s the point?
What’s the reason for doing it?
There’s no advantage over a real cookbook, where at least the actual recipe has been assembled, eaten, and enjoyed enough to be deemed worthy of inclusion by the author. ChatGPT does no such thing unless it finds real cookbooks to reference.
Now, if you feed it real cookbooks into the context (or use some built in feature that does so), and ask it “pick me a recipe I would like. Modify it.”
That’s fine!
That’s right up an LLM’s alley.
But you can’t feed it SEO spam and expect something good out. Garbage in, garbage out is the term data scientists use.
This is what I try to emphasize every time I talk about LLMs. They have to be machines you understand the inputs and outputs of, not a black box you can trust to give you reliable info when you don’t know how it gets it.
On a separate note, I really, really hate OpenAI. I think they are a pyramid scheme.
I always suggest using literally any LLM but ChatGPT. Literally any one. Ideally an open weights one, but please, just not ChatGPT for so many reasons…
Not sure why you’re getting the downvotes. Your comment is educated and makes sense. I’m still against the use of LLM’s based on the fact they are pure theft, owned by billionaires, and destroying the earth, but I do agree, at least use it correctly and use the correct tool. If all information was paid for, all data centers owned by the public, completely transparent on the info they contain, and ran completely on renewable energy, there’d be nothing really wrong with the tech (other than creating slop that destroyed the internet and eroded trust in everything, which is a massive downside).
All true.
… Though I’m personally more forgiving Apache-licensed, open weights models trained on peanuts.
Ripping out the commercial aspect and intensity of training nullifies out a whole lot of issues, just like open source code does, even if the models are still problematic (just like a lot of open source code/projects are problematic).
I’m also of the opinion that massive LLM proliferation exacerbated the cracks in internet and institutions that were already there. They were already in trouble, but all this just made it glaringly obvious.
ChatGPT and others have a ~ 90% and more hallucination rate on questions it wasnt trained on. You’re playing a game of luck using gpt and others for knowledge that you’re not verifying by source.
What content is it not trained on?
Somewhat tailored response per your username: Anything the ministry of truth decides should not be part of the training set.
But more generally, even in things like neurodivergence, lots of questions you could ask that would be in the bounds of “guesstimation” by professionals. The problem is these LLM will spout pure utter highly-believably-confident snake oil with the tiniest little legal microscopic fineprint on the side of the html webpage that you can never scroll to saying “AI responses can be wrong”.
For me, the mere fact that you have a nicely worded source of information that, depending if you’re lucky with your question, is pure scientific fact, or utter maddening bullshit, makes me terrified to use it.
The warnings are prominently displayed and I’m sorry but we can’t just toss tech out because some people are stupid. I get wrong answers from professionals, too.
For me, I just got used to it being “mostly” correct. Im not betting my life on these things. I use them for recepies and im not putting poison in my food if it would say so. :)
Funny you should use that example, because a farmer destroyed twenty five acres of food crops by poisoning them because an AI told him to (thankfully killing the plants before they could end up on someone’s plate…)
BTW, not to pick on you, but it’s “recipes”, not “recepies”.
I think the best use case for AI is the initial search phase. Using AI to create news articles, code, music, videos, etc is just slop. But asking a question and getting a starting place can be helpful. I consider AI to be the modern version of the search engine.
Just be very aware that these models make shit up all the time. So asking a factual question needs to be reviewed before trusting the answer. Otherwise you get those glue pizzas.
People need that warning about facts when it comes to people yapping.
I can deal with an ai being wrong because an ai is not malicious. It may be programmed a way but it’s not directly trying to screw me.
People lie cheat and steal and you never know when they are trying it.
You’re right, but it’s working with data from people who might be, and because it cooks it all down you can’t be sure of the origins of that data. There’s an entire industry popping up now to “lean” AI answers in “approved” directions. It’s SEO optimization, for AI answers.
I treat “AI” like an overhyped, incredibly-energy-inefficient search engine. I check every citation it makes, every time. Sometimes this is better than a straight search, sometimes it’s not. But the main thing is that EVERY result is treated as untrustworthy by default. If a boring search engine result persistently sent me to the same site written by a human, and I found the results worthwhile, that site (and the responsible human) would build trust over time and I’d do less checking. But with AI you’re constantly dealing with the “data slurry”, so no trust is (or ever should be) built. You’re starting from scratch, every time.
Is it suggesting recipes it found, or recipes it “created”? It’s an important distinction.
It’s generating recepies. So you can say you want certain ingredients and you don’t like others, ask it to make a list of stuff you could try, and you will get that. Also, you can ask it during cooking exactly how to cut the pieces for best result, or if you want something more spicy and so on. It’s much better than a static recepie. This is more like being able to talk about a dish and adjust it according to your taste, replace certain ingredients if you like, and so on.
Im using it daily and prefer it very much to browsing recepie sites.
Okay, you’re using it was a random number generator and search engine. That’s fine. I’d be concerned if someone used it to create recipes… and for the record, I’d be just as distrustful of a person who has never cooked in their lives suggesting recipe modifications, too.
What difference does that make? You need to know the basics and you need to use critical thinking. Making new recipes is just trial and error. ChatGPT just gives suggestions. If it suggests something you’ve never heard of you double check it using a reputable resource.
Nah if it tells you to put bleach in there you listen because, according to lemmy, you have no free will.
People here want to dislike AI so bad that as soon as it says something wrong, they disqualify the entire technology.
We don’t hate the technology. We hate that people who have zero idea how computing works think they are being so unique by boiling our oceans so they can put glue on pizza. If people were slightly less lazy pieces of shit with any morals, they’d find a way to cook without enabling the downfall of humanity. But humans are idiots, and are going to take the easiest path possible, instead of using tools we’ve had for decades.
If we had more autistic folks with a strong sense of justice, we’d be a lot better off.
Man say what you will about chatGPT recipies. All im gonna say is that since adding PVA to my pizza toppings my cheese has stayed exactly where it should!