A new report exposes thousands of scam websites flooding the web with AI-generated recipes.
In the report, Decrypt Ads — a startup that tracks the supply chains of online advertisements — identified more than two thousand websites that strongly appear to be AI slop farms masquerading as blogs run by real chefs and home cooks. These sites, the report found, are pumping fake recipes into search engines like Google as well as social media platforms such as Pinterest, often relying on sketchy Russian and Chinese adtech partners to monetize the operations.
It’s “common knowledge that publishers in certain niches are being openly deceptive about their owners and authors, using AI photos and fake back stories on their sites,” reads the report, which was published today. “Some of the most consistent growth in AI slop spreading across the internet has come from AI recipe websites.”
Security expert and Decrypt Ads researcher Zach Edwards told Futurism that he initially identified about 400 suspicious websites that seemed to be publishing AI-generated recipes under the names of fake chefs. Using “technical fingerprints,” he then found hundreds more sites associated with the suspicious domains he manually uncovered — bringing the tally up to roughly 2,100 different domains, many of which seem to be run by the same sloperators.
