recipe-scrapers, a python library for scraping the recipes only from hundreds of different recipe sites and blogs. Powers other tools like pure-recipe. Doesn’t use AI.
Those are put there for SEO purposes. Google favors sites with these big stories. The copyright issue alone doesn’t justify what’s there; you could do a quick blurb of a few sentences and it would be enough. Plenty of cookbooks do that.
This is why a lot of those sites have a button that says “skip to recipe”. It’s a bunch of text that’s meant to be for robots, not you, and they really don’t care if you read it.
Now that it’s being created by LLMs, we may have the first known example of human language written by robots and intended for robots. Welcome to a cyberpunk dystopia.
There’s so much “work” done in our capitalist society that is actively creating a drag on our lives, all to extract more money from us to the billionaire class. It will never be enough for them. Bezos and Fuckerberg would own slaves if the state allowed them to.
But I was told capitalism was the most efficient system.
Most efficient for what?
Don’t worry about it, it’s just more efficient.
SEO is part of it, but it’s also literally just more physical real estate for ads. Recipe sites, including personal recipe blogs, are infamous for the sheer volume of ads placed on them. Yes, everyone just scrolls to the recipe so it kind of doesn’t matter, but longer text means more space for ads.
So why not put the recipe first, and the bullshit after?
Search engines favor text earlier in the site. Text “above the fold” (the area where you wouldn’t have to scroll to see it) is scored higher.
https://www.pedalo.co.uk/seo-experiment-text-position-keyword-rankings/
That actually sucks. Googles SEO algorithms force websites to homogenize.
Ahh, that explains it then. Cheers!
Because that’s what computers used to be for. Now we drive engagement.
But OP stated that, the text only being there to manipulate SEO, the authors don’t really care of you read it. So out it at thd bottom, after the recipe!
Yeah, I think I live in a dreamworld like in the old show Computer Chronicles when computers were presented by scientists and used by engineers to do actual work. It was easy (for me) to grasp.
Now we have every sector of human activity, including those I consider at best useless, at worst harmful, like endless advertising, merchandising, propagandizing, misinforming, etc boosted exponentially because of essentially free computer power.
Not building a leisure society and using our tools for good, instead we just amplify the worst aspects of humanity.
I’ve had to explain that to people soooo many times. All those words, all those pics (with alt text), it’s just to make the site higher on the search results…
Hey OP, please credit the creator if you can next time!
Oh wow, didn’t realize it was cropped.
I don’t think it is cropped? There doesn’t seem to be a signature or watermark or whatever on the original either.
So I guess you did your best on this one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The cruel part is that it was nested somewhere in the story and he scrolled past it just after day one.
Recipe articles are probably the best examples of web content whose only real purpose is ad clicks. All of the text is flavor text, in every sense.
If the “jump to recipe” button doesnt work or doesnt exist, Im out.
Sadly, by the time you see that the button isn’t there, you’ve already given them the visit and ad impressions… Well, unless you run an ad blocker but what horrible person would do that?
Adblocker FTW. Also im pretty sure ads dont pay shit without clickthrough. God the current financialisation of the web sucks ass.
Add “cooked.wiki/“ in front of any recipe url to preserve your sanity
time to make a recipe website that hides the recipe in JavaScript, but leaves the story in HTML.
Satan: “Alright, let’s all calm down for just a moment.”
Just make the recipe an image that only appears when you rotate the 3D dog to face 👉 this way
Holy fuck I needed this in my life
A website that begs you to download their app instead of just having recipes?
True, it does advertise its app. But you can still put in a recipe link and it cleans it up without the app or logging in. Which is way better than the original recipe website.
Is there a site that does it right? I just need an ingredient list, times, temperatures and maybe a handful of specific pointers if I really need them.
Someone should make a browser extension or something that automatically recognizes what part of the page is the recipe, extracts it, and only shows you that.
The paprika app does this
seriouseats.com used to be a lot better, but the fluff before the recipe is generally focused on why the recipe uses the ingredients and quantities it uses, what else was tried, and what the results were. Especially for the older articles written by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, it ends up being almost more useful than the final recipe they land on. I know you were asking for a no-frills recipe site, but this approach is great for two reasons: 1) you can scroll to the bottom for a no-frills recipe, and 2) if that didn’t work, or if you want to tweak it, the full article has a ton of helpful information, and not, like, a biography of the author’s grandma.
His chocolate chip cookie article is a all-timer for food science.
You of in the food and of out the cold hot food
Come again?
I use https://www.copymethat.com/ and share an account with my wife. The app makes it easy for us to use while cooking and scraping recipes even works on mobile! You can add the ingredients to a shopping list, and it even organizes them by aisle/category!
eh bad take imo, this is one of the few places where AI shines, it’s great because you no longer need to go to a recipe website to begin with, you just ask it for a recipe and it gives you one and then you can discuss different variants etc
Like those that use glue to keep cheese from sliding off the pizza.
In case you’re not joking, please don’t trust this technology with anything that you are putting into your or someone else’s body. You’re going to have a bad time.
In case you’re not joking, please don’t trust this technology with anything that you are putting into your or someone else’s body. You’re going to have a bad time.
It’s too late buddy
Similarly, a February study from the University of Sydney, which surveyed more than 2,000 adults, reported that nearly six in ten respondents had asked ChatGPT at least one high-risk health question—queries that would typically require professional clinical input.
https://observer.com/2025/05/openai-chatgpt-health-care-use/
Also please don’t go blindly believing all advice you’re given, you obviously don’t use glue on a pizza in the same way you don’t follow google maps through a river or off a pier.
So in this case you would have to go to another website to find a real recipe anyway.
Just use the glue like a good acolyte!
Just use the glue like a good acolyte!
I personally wouldn’t but I’m scared I might be talking to someone who drinks it
So in this case you would have to go to another website to find a real recipe anyway.
Right, have you used perplexity at all?
I heard perplexity eats electricity, which makes it even dumber than me.
You do you, AI bro, you do you. Suggesting that anyone else use a tool that is meant to generate text that sounds confidently factual, without factuality actually being a requirement for the output is silly. Maybe if using a local LLM with a RAG (with the vector DB populated with known good recipes) and having the temp set properly. Then again, LLMs are language models and not good with numbers because they are fundamentally not designed for that kind of thing.
At that point, it’s less work to just grab a cookbook from the shelf and find a recipe by looking it up in the index. If it’s not in there, it’s probably available in a niche source which can be directly looked at.
How much glue should I add to my pasta?
You should not add glue to pasta when cooking or serving it. The idea of adding glue, such as Elmer’s glue or any craft glue, to pasta is not appropriate for food consumption and is likely a joke or misunderstanding found in some informal discussions.
@grok is this true?
Not if you want any kind of consistency so you can actually replicate or understand what you’re doing. Like hallucinations aside (and we really shouldn’t put them aside because they’re a very real thing in this context), the point of a recipe is that you aren’t just getting an averaged version of the process; you’re getting a curated version with specific considerations in mind.
So you can ask AI for a cinnamon apple pie recipe, and you might get an okay one, but you’re probably never going to get a better-than-average one. And if you do like the version of the recipe it gave you, you had better write it down because when you ask for it next time, it’s not going to be the same cinnamon apple pie recipe. I’ve personally played around with recipes in AI, and even within the same chat, there’s no consistency because it never “knows” anything; it only makes predictive guesses. So when I say, “I like that recipe, but let’s try half as much ginger and maybe add some mirin,” it will reduce the ginger and add mirin, but suddenly all the volumes of the other ingredients have changed, and some items may even disappear.
So yeah, I think this is something that AI could potentially work well for in the future, as is kind of always the case with any potentially useful AI application right now. But right now, until they’ve been developed with some kind of better active memory and/or something resembling comprehension rather than predictive association, I think this is a field where AI is passable at best, not yet somewhere it shines.
I respectfully disagree, while you might be able to get some pointers, I would not trust LLMs with the ingredients quantities (given that replacing a number or measure unit is quite easy and would go unnoticed)
So while I could understand asking: “should I put bell peppers on this dish?”, I would never trust it’s answer to “how much bell pepper should I put in the recipe?” (Which I believe is what recipes are about)
I would never trust it’s answer to “how much bell pepper should I put in the recipe?” (Which I believe is what recipes are about)
I mean to be fair, you’re free to click on the links if you want to verify these things no?
So since we have to manually verify everything anyway, the LLM just becomes a mere search engine.
This contradicts the entire point you claimed it was useful in the first place because we would still have to visit those websites.
Why do I feel like I’m teaching toddlers how basic AI works
Because you’re being a pretentious asshole and you yourself do not understand how AI works, nor can you argue against “it isn’t reliable for recipes since it hallucinates”? It’s either that, or you are the only smart person in this thread. Not sure which.
it isn’t reliable for recipes since it hallucinates
This is how it goes:
- Don’t use AI
- See memes about AI getting it wrong
- Believe that AI gets it wrong 100% of the time
You guys are just as bad as trump supporters
- Don’t have an EV
- See memes about EV’s catching on fire
- Believe that EV’s catch on fire all the time
8/10
I’m impressed
https://youtu.be/Ci-Evf8nQH4?t=934
Lemmy users:
Look out you’ll die if you use AI to make some food! Don’t even use it for recommendations or ideas or maybe different things you can try or maybe you want to know a way to do a specific thing or try a slight variant because you might drink battery acid by mistake!!!1
If you prefer instant gratification and “good enough” over robust, verifiable information: be my guest. But it doesn’t make you superior. You are not unique, skilled or brave for using LLMs.
I think virtually everyone here has played with them. We’ve all seen better and worse outputs. You are not unique, you just care less about truth and accuracy.
What makes you believe I haven’t used AI before? I’m well acquainted with it. But it simply isn’t a reliable or useful tool for what you want to do with it. You want to make lesson plans or debug code with it, it works well as a sounding board. But you cannot reliably use it for information you don’t already have.
Oh, I didn’t know they do links now
In this case I’ll give you that it can be useful (mostly in reading several recipes and summarizing), but personally I’m still going to do the old school web search (if anything, just to exercise my information retrieval skill, which I believe is important)
Why use the AI in the first place then? Just search for the actual recipe sources from the start.
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Did you just ask the AI why you should use the AI?
This is how the planet dies. Just burning fossil fuels asking a text generator why you shouldn’t eat glue.
Removed by mod
I’ve seen too many hallucinations specifically with this to even want to try it.
What ai were you using? I’m curious (and expecting either Google AI summary or no response)
It’s awesome that it gives you cooking tips you’ll find no where else, like adding glue to improve the consistency of cheese. Or making sure you get your recommended daily serving amount of rocks.
This sounds like a way to get food poisoning.
Agree. I’ve discovered some good unique gluten free cooking options for my son with AI. I never even knew about Coconut Aminos.
Man the ai hate is so strong on lemmy they can’t even admit when it’s good at something. Though I’m guessing a lot of these people’s experience with getting recipes from it is memes of bad hallucinations and not actually trying it looking at all the “glue on pizza” takes.
I’ll back you up though, have gotten a lot of good recipes from chatgpt, even for baking which doesn’t have a lot of room for error.
you should ask ai why you don’t have a gf
Ok, you made me look.
Perplexity got the longest, most boring and uplifting article about how it’s normal and there’s nothing to worry about. It never mentioned that my wife would dislike the idea, so the personalization was off for the day.
Also, it gave no references. What is weird. Like if the text was hardcoded there.
