The AI industry and its legions of AI bros are hellbent on force-feeding everyone AI slop.
Most of us encounter these surreal monstrosities as an assault on our eyeballs: weird TikToks of humanoid animals living a white picket fence existence accidentally cannibalizing their young, for instance, or anthropomorphized food items sobbing before they’re boiled alive.
But it can get way worse, an intrepid reporter found.
Mia Mercado at The Cut delved into the culinary frontier of AI-generated recipes, and in the several-course-meal of this endeavor, subjected herself to eating “literal AI slop” that she cooked herself, to see if the instructions held up in reality.
On TikTok, she found a recipe video for cottage cheese breadsticks which was entirely AI-made, down to the voiceover, the loud “crunch” of the food, and the physics-defying visuals.
“After combining the blended cottage cheese with an egg and mozzarella, I added the optional (???) garlic powder, salt, and pepper. The batter was loose, and my hopes were low,” Mercado wrote. “How would this pan of goop become twisted, bready sticks?”
Narrator: they didn’t.
“It’s more like an eggy sheet with herbs,” Mercado lamented. “When I tried to twist the strips to resemble the original video, three of them fell apart. They tasted like a weird omelet.” Their final rating: “0 out of 5 AI-generated thumbs.”
TikTok commenters, none of whom exhibited any suspicion that they were viewing something an AI-model bullsh*tted, were equally disappointed.
“This mixture is too liquidy to form anything. Is an ingredient missing?” one wrote.
Another posted a photo of their attempt at following the recipe, which looked like a melted blob. “Ummmm… that’s how mine looked when I started cooking it,” the user wrote.
Luckily for Mercado, an AI-generated recipe for spicy buffalo chickpea wraps turned out to be pretty good, earning four out of five thumbs.
The catch: “This recipe was most certainly stolen from Minimalist Baker, much of the recipe wording is identical,” Mercado said.
Her luck didn’t hold. When Mercado tried a recipe for — get this — “Fettucine with pineapple-cashew cream sauce,” which did appear to be an original AI creation, it was monstrous. “I don’t know why anyone would make this recipe, unless they had an abundance of soaked cashews and fresh pineapple to use ASAP,” she sneered.
While it’s an amusing experiment, Mercado’s unnecessary act of self-flagellation underscores how AI slop can creep into our real lives. Millions are taking the words of these hallucinating machines as gospel. Bad actors use them to churn out fake videos to generate political outrage. If there’s any merit to the adage of “you are what you eat,” it’s worth avoiding consuming anything cooked up by an AI model.
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