Food bloggers are seeing a drop in traffic as home cooks turn to AI, according to Bloomberg:

Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won’t achieve; Google’s AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people’s feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue.

How bad can it be? To give just one example (from Fortune):

For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic — and her revenue — has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

My thoughts on this:

• There already was several problems in the food blogging area, like too many people trying to make a go of it by writing about cooking. Not to mention that there was a problem with plagiarism within the world of food blogging. Now there is a new plagiarism problem, with AI essentially copying recipes and putting them forward as another source of cooking information.
• AI plagiarism is not limited to food blogging. I’ve seen the same problem within the IT domain, with vapid sites posting “solutions” to technical problems that are a waste of time.
• For people and organization that generate content hoping to get people to read it, AI will be squeezing people from both sides. Human generated content with be squeezed out by AI generated content. And with things like Google Zero, search engines will use AI to summarize that content, so that the person searching for information will not go to the next step of clicking through a link to get to another site.
• Like the person who runs the site Clean Eating Kitchen, I suspect many smaller sites will dry up as a source of content. I think you will then have these aggregators (either Google or large AI generated content sites) plus other quality sites that can still compete, be they cooking.nytimes.com or marthastewart.com or even specialized sites like alisoneroman.com. This is not unlike Travel or Hotel sites that can still maintain a presence even though search engines like Google will scrape prices and present them.
• Eventually, like all things in IT, there will be a continuing swing towards centralization, until the classic problems of centralization occurs. Then you will have niche sites breaking out again and things will decentralize. Until then, the rise of AI both on the front end (Google) and the back end (AI generated sites) will force out these midtier sites like Clean Eating Kitchen.
• I am not immune to this problem. I see this site being scraped on the regular, presumably by AI. The good news for me is I write this site as much for me as for anyone else. I am happy if I can post things that help people. However, if some AI site presents the information and it helps people, I don’t care that they didn’t get it directly from me. I still benefit from writing these posts. If I were paying my bills with this site, it would be a problem. But this site is just a hobby for me.

(Image from Pixabay, which appears to be AI generated. Pixabay used to be a good source of imagery, but it has been overrun by AI generated images.  I found this by looking for “ai generated cooking” images.)