It’s getting harder than ever to tell what was made by AI and what was made by a person, especially with recipes. A dish can look flawless on screen and still fail in the oven, because no one ever cooked it. Sometimes the photo is generated. Sometimes the method is stitched together from other people’s work. A group of recipe developers is pushing back by creating a safe space for home cooks, stocked only with verified, human-created recipes.
Jenn Allen, a chef for nearly her entire adult life, came up with the idea. For years, she said, “the only thing we had to worry about on the internet were bad recipes.” AI changed that. Cooks now run into recipes cobbled together from several others, Allen said, and some that were “flat out never tested.” “Even trusted platforms were overrun by AI-generated content,” she said. “It was getting increasingly difficult to tease out what’s human-created and what’s AI junk. Even the images started getting better.”
Most cooks still look to people for recipes
Better fakes are a problem because most home cooks still want a person behind the recipe. In a May survey of 2,008 Americans, 48% named food blogs and websites as their top source for recipe inspiration. Only 12% said they would purposefully use AI.
Creators say their work is getting buried
Last November, 22 independent food creators told Bloomberg that AI-generated “recipe slop” was distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online. Pinterest’s share of Colleen Milne’s readers at The Food Blog fell from roughly 25% to 11% in a year, and her monthly Pinterest views dropped from around 1.3 million to 419,000. Marita Sinden of MyDinner reported Google traffic down 30% that year and Pinterest down 50%. Carrie Forrest of Clean Eating Kitchen said 80% of her traffic and revenue had disappeared in two years. Pinterest told Bloomberg that creators’ traffic can fluctuate for many reasons.
Katalin Nagy runs Spatula Desserts. “As a trained pastry chef, I started noticing last year that some of my recipes on Pinterest were being outranked by what were, to me, very obviously AI-generated recipe accounts,” she said. “Some of these sites looked entirely AI-generated; others had even copied my recipes, my photography style and, in some cases, my actual photos.”
She shared a screenshot of one of those sites, featuring an AI-generated éclair photo, with her 140,000 Instagram followers and asked whether they knew AI was creating fake recipes. “I was genuinely surprised to discover that around seven out of 10 people who responded didn’t know,” Nagy said. “Since then, I’ve made it a regular part of my work to educate my audience about AI-generated recipe sites, both through my newsletters and on Instagram.”
Platforms are responding, and creators are still pressing
Pinterest began labeling AI-modified images worldwide in April 2025 and added controls in October 2025 that let users see less AI content in select categories. Google changed how AI Mode handles recipes in March 2026, letting users tap a dish to see links to recipe sites. On June 30, it moved those links to the top of responses, now showing creator names and ratings. Google’s Robby Stein said the company is still working on recipe results. Inspired Taste, which has criticized Google’s AI recipes, called the change a big step in the right direction but said Google still had a lot of work to do.
Bloomberg’s creators described entering last year’s holiday season with a mix of anxiety and resignation. Google’s changes came afterward. So are food bloggers still fighting AI recipes, or have they made peace with them?
Allen built a catalog of real recipes
Allen’s answer was to build a site. “To combat this, I created Tastes Delicious,” she said. Her husband, Matthew Allen of Dragon Website Services, built it from her vision. She co-founded it with Mandy Applegate of Splash of Taste. Its first recipe went live July 27.
The site interviews every recipe developer before they join, and someone has to vouch for them. Developers also attest that their recipes and photographs are AI-free. Allen describes the result as “a visual catalog of tried-and-true recipes from real recipe creators.” Each card links straight to the creator’s own website, and nothing opens on Tastes Delicious itself. The catalog holds 4,000 human-generated recipes and is growing. Readers can save favorites and build their own cookbooks in a dashboard.
Creators worry about who keeps publishing
Forrest told Bloomberg she worried that if more creators give up, AI will have little left to draw from except its own output. Sarah Leung of The Woks of Life questioned whether publishing new reference guides is worth it when readers may never find them.
Google has said it is still working on its recipe results, and Pinterest has said it will add more categories to its AI controls. The holidays are just around the corner. Last year, Eb Gargano of Easy Peasy Foodie said traffic to her turkey recipe was down 40% from the year before.
For cooks who would rather not gamble on a holiday recipe this year, Tastes Delicious offers a place to start. Every dish traces back to the person who created it.
Jessica Haggard is the creator behind Easy Homemade Life, where she develops comfort food for everyday meals and for gathering with the people you love. She’s especially known for recreating the restaurant dishes readers can’t stop thinking about and reviving old-fashioned potluck classics worth passing down, every recipe tested and perfected in her own home kitchen. Her work has been featured on Yahoo, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Post, Chicago Sun-Times and The Seattle Times.