One convenient feature of Instacart is a listing of “Related recipes” it will provide you if you are searching for a product or ingredient. For instance, I was searching for “biscuits” and one of the recipes that appeared to me was no-milk biscuits. Hmmmm, that could be good and simple, I thought. Seemed reasonable too. Then I scrolled down the bottom to the recipe and came across the text: this recipe is powered by the magic of AI.

First off, let me say: AI is not magic. Second, this COULD be a good recipe. Or it could be something where AI hallucinated ingredients or quantities. For this recipe, it is somewhat close to this recipe for dairy free biscuits at allRecipes.com, but it is missing some ingredients and the quantities of some of the ingredients are different. I searched other recipes at other sites, and while it is close to them, it seems…lacking…in comparison.

Simply put: you would be better off getting recipes from either reputable cookbooks or websites where recipes are tested and confirmed. It is convenient to use the recipes in places like Instacart, because you can easily add the ingredients of the recipe to your shopping cart, but the results from the recipes generated by AI could leave you very disappointed. Especially when it comes to baking!

P.S. Not to pick just on Instacart: I suspect we are going to see more and more of this type of AI generated advice on websites. Keep an eye out for it.