- AI-generated recipes are popping up all over Facebook — and real people are making them.
- Some people don’t realize they’re making a dish from a recipe written by a robot.
- I had to try making one myself, just to see how it would turn out.
AI-generated recipes are popping up all over Facebook — circulating from pages that pump out eerie-looking images of food by the hour.
Unlike the “Shrimp Jesus” type of AI-generated slop, this food-centered stuff flies under the radar because it looks so much like an existing genre that’s already all over social media: gooey cheese-pull style food porn.
So, while an image of an old woman standing next to a crocheted tank is obviously fake, no one is going to bat an eye at a recipe for a healthy weeknight dinner.
I looked into a few Facebook pages that are posting what appear to be AI-generated recipes with AI-generated images. (How’d I come to suspect? The images had telltale signs of AI, like disappearing tines on a fork or weirdly shaped fingers or distorted edges.)
What I found most surprising: People are actually cooking these AI-generated recipes. Sometimes, they’re even enjoying the results.
So I had to get in on the kitchen action myself. I made one of the salmon dishes — let’s call it “SalmonGPT.”
One popular Facebook page pumps out recipes each hour
I focused on Lora Chef, a Facebook page with more than 150,000 followers. It’s one of many similar recipe pages with some telltale AI features that are proliferating across the platform. The page’s profile picture features an attractive brunette woman. It also links out to a website, which offers a signup for an email recipe newsletter.
The phone number on the Lora Chef Facebook page didn’t work when I tried multiple times over several days. I emailed the contact address listed and initially got a reply— “hi, how can I help you?” — but the account didn’t respond to subsequent emails with my questions, like who was behind the page and to confirm it was using AI. I also sent a Facebook direct message and didn’t get a reply. According to the page’s “about” section, its managers are located in Morocco and Turkey.
In theory, AI-generated images are supposed to be labeled on Meta platforms, but it’s a tricky task, and let’s be honest: AI chicken parm isn’t going to destabilize democracy. Meta pointed to this policy and declined to comment further.
Lora Chef has lately been posting a new recipe to Facebook about once an hour, which means there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of recipes. (I gave up scrolling when I got as far back as December, but the page was created in July 2024.)
The images all have a similar appearance. Specifically, almost all the dishes have the same beige sauce oozing out over the food — usually from a spoon, fork, chopsticks, or some other utensil that only AI could dream up. The sauce looks oddly similar in all the dishes, but in their titles, the recipes refer to it as a garlic sauce, white sauce, cream sauce, garlic aioli dipping sauce, etc. (Even the desserts have the same-looking sauce.)
The dishes look reasonably appealing, and a lot of them have comments from real people expressing things like “yummy!” or saying they’d like to try it. Very commonly, people tag a friend in the comments — perhaps suggesting it to a spouse for dinner.
A food writer in Omaha, Nebraska, told me that AI recipes are latching onto something.
“I can see the interest people have in the recipes, which all feature trendy ingredients like cottage cheese — or heavily featuring protein, and all with very bright, appealing photos,” said Sarah Baker Hansen, who runs a food website and writes for the nonprofit Flatwater Free Press. “It seems designed for clicks, shares, and comments.”
Still, she said, when looking at recipes across lots of different Facebook pages, “I think it’s pretty obvious which posts are computer-generated and which are actual recipes made by humans, with photographs taken by humans.”
These people actually cooked the recipes
In the comments on the Lora Chef page for a vegetables and tzatziki dip, Lizzy Mimzy said the sauce ended up tasting exactly like ranch. When I chatted with her, she said she had made several other dishes from the page but hadn’t realized it was AI. “I was wondering why the pictures looked like all similar colors and textures,” she said.
“AI-generated kinda takes away from the real love people put in their food,” Mimzy said.
Jacq Dolittle commented that her boyfriend had made the “grilled chicken and broccoli bowl with creamy garlic sauce” — one of the page’s most popular posts, with more than 2,600 comments and 25,000 shares on Facebook. She told me it turned out a little bland but still good. “I have heard AI recipes are always a bit off, LOL,” she wrote.
Other dishes seemed to have some problems.
On a popular Parmesan-crusted chicken recipe, several comments mentioned that the chicken needed to be pan-fried, not baked, to achieve the kind of brown crust in the image. One comment read: “I didn’t realize this was AI-generated until after I made it, and I’m disappointed in myself. The sauce isn’t too bad aside from being watery, and the chicken itself tastes like nothing LOL.”
I made AI salmon with avocado crema and lime
I had to test out one of these recipes for myself. I’m no stranger to trying AI-suggested food — I once made pizza with glue in the sauce because Google’s AI answers suggested it.
From the Lora Chef page, I picked a recent recipe for salmon with a — you guessed it — white sauce because it seemed relatively easy, and I needed it easy because I am a very, very bad cook.
The cream sauce called for a food processor, which I wasn’t entirely happy to have to drag out of the cupboard, but OK.
The salmon called for some spices on top and then pan-frying in olive oil. My husband, the chef of the family, remarked that canola oil would typically be preferred because of its higher smoke point. (Perhaps this was an AI mistake.)
In the end, I served it over rice, and it was … fine. Somewhat bland, both the fish and the sauce. But I ate the AI food and lived.
AI, it seems, is capable of generating acceptable recipes for common dishes. This makes sense — there’s a lot about cooking that is replicated over and over, and the same steps tend to follow each other in the process. This is perfect for AI.
But even though generative AI can do some things capably, it doesn’t always do things well. Real recipe writing is nuanced and difficult work — cooks test out each step and use their knowledge to avoid pitfalls. For example, my salmon called for sesame seeds on top (I skipped them), but those seeds probably would’ve burned in the pan (although they would have been good for baked or roasted salmon). A human recipe writer would’ve intuitively known this.
On the scale of what harm AI-generated content flooding Facebook might do, recipes are certainly not like political misinformation or a financial scam.
But unlike other AI-generated stuff, which might just elicit a comment or a “like” from an unsuspecting person, there are actually people out there spending their evenings cooking and eating these recipes.
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