For Vrghr's foodie fans and those following from FACCC2, this wuff has noticed an unfortunate trend that seems to be growing. Just like "fake news", fake photos, and deepfake videos, fake foods with recipes entirely created by AI are a thing on the web now.

Particularly on Facebook, but also occurring on other social medial, posters are abusing new software that lets folks take a photo of a dish and create the recipe for it using AI.

There are many apps like that out there: Facebook has "PixFood" that uses an “Inverse Cooking” AI system to create recipes from food photos. Other apps include "Masterpals: Photo to Food", "Photo ToRecipe", "recipesgenie", "Recipix", "Recipe Lens", "Photo Recipe", and more.

Don't confuse these recipe apps with others that are intended to help improve photos of food for bloggers and restaurants. These others don't create recipes, they use photo filters and other techniques to improve composition, backgrounds, lighting, hue, etc., to help you upgrade your phone shot of a restaurant dish into something close to that from a "food stylist" offering.

When used as intended, the recipe apps may or may not help a cook in the kitchen. The intent is to allow you to snap a photo at your favorite restaurant or from a magazine image and devise not only the ingredient list but the cooking times, temperatures, and techniques to recreate the dish. They may provide a starting point, but there have been quite a few folks online who have posted videos of them following these instructions to the letter and ending up with some pretty lame, often inedible results.

For those who have some cooking skills these might form a basis to start from but you'll still need to inject some "reality" into their suggestions. And even with that, creating a dish that exactly matches what you photographed depends a lot more on plating skills and nuance, though your results might taste pretty close.

Thing is, these Apps are, at best, "guessing" at the ingredients they can't see, based on standardized options for the sort of food pictured. Likewise for those they CAN see, but can't pick a precise ingredient from sight. For instance, is that spec of leafy green cilantro or parsley? Or maybe tarragon, or is it chopped basil? For those who have spent any time at all in front of a stove, you're aware at how completely the taste of a dish would change by substituting any of those for another. These apps have also been shown to have some pretty severe difficulties estimating amounts of ingredients. Is that really only 1 Cup of flour in that cake recipe? And 2 teaspoons of salt? Bakers who have made a scratch cake might be wincing about now. Folks that have tried these recipes only are often shown asking things like, "If this is a cake batter, why does it look like crepe batter (or bread dough)?"

If any of our FACCC2 cooks or wuff's followers have tried out some of these apps, Vrghr is eager to learn how it went for you! Please let wuffy know in your replies here.

But this isn't the "CAUTION" part of why Vrghr posted this journal. Here's where things take a turn for the worse:
A lot of "influencers" and those out for "the clicks" are creating false foods completely from AI! They use AI to create an image of a fantasy dish based on some inputs. Then they run that image through one of those photo-to-food apps like PixFood to create an untested AI recipe from the AI image. Then they post it as if they had created the dish themselves, and "Here's the recipe for you to make your own! Please follow me for more!".

There's been a flood of these on Facebook and elsewhere recently, and the torrent seems to be growing. Facebook is doing nothing to protect their customers from these fake foods. Neither are the other social platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and others. Wuff hasn't seen a trend to there here on FurAffinity, at least among those posting to FACCC2 or the other cooks wuff follows. Perhaps foodies don't compose enough of an audience here to make the fakes worth while? But Vrghr is happy that we haven't been "invaded" by them yet.

But the results of these totally fake image and recipes, if you try to follow them, are invariably horrible. You're very likely to waste your time and a lot of expensive ingredients to end up with something that goes straight into the trash. Worse, you may end up damaging your cookware or appliances, or yourself, when techniques stick, scorch, smoke, spit, or even catch fire. And some of these creations actually end up hazardous it eaten!

Wuff is just tossing this out there for those who happen to enjoy researching new dishes, techniques, etc., on line to try at home, as Vrghr does. Be cautious and use what knowledge of cooking you have to evaluate these unknown offerings. The images frequently tip you off through typical "AI Artifacts", but the recipe ingredients and techniques themselves can be another flag. Do the quantities of things like flour, sugar, salt, etc., make sense for the kind of dish pictured? Are there steps in the techniques/instructions that ring warning bells? If you follow the person posting, does it even look like a dish they're likely to be able to create?

If any of these trigger an alert for you, do a bit more exploration in your searching. Can you find similar dishes elsewhere, perhaps from known sources like "Epicurious", "Taste of Home", "Delish", "Serious Eats", "America's Test Kitchen", "Food Wishes: Chef John", "Alton Brown: Good Eats", "NYT Cooking", and others, or is this the only dish like it on the web? If you do find similar recipes, check for significant "deltas" between the content from those legit sites and the one you're considering. If there are, go with the known-good source!

(And maybe let those you know to avoid the fake one, to save them their own hardships of discovery.)

Bon Appetite!
VRGHR