Raw LLM Responses

I agree so much. Look, I’m a writer. It’s how I make my living. Mostly online content. But I’m also an avid home chef. I love cooking for myself and my friends, especially more complex and unusual things. Recipe sites used to be such a great resource. But they’ve contented themselves into a corner. I want to make some French onion soup, so I find a recipe that, in the preview, looks good. I click on it, and before I get to anything I get a video ad auto-playing over the content with no way to close it. Then I get a pop-up prompting me to subscribe to a daily (!?) email about new recipes and “partner deals”. Then the site content loads. I try to find the actual recipe or list of ingredients between all of the ads, but before I get to the actual recipe — this is a recipe site, right? — I get a story. “When I was a grad student at the Univeristy of Washington, there was a cafe that I went to often. They had great coffee (because, duh, Seattle!) and the best grilled cheese sandwiches ever (see recipe here!). But I remember the French onion soup. Not just because it was unforgettable (Obviously!) but because of the barista/waiter/heartthrob behind the counter. It was a crisp fall day, and I only had an hour between classes, and there he was, Jonathan, working. I had forgotten my scarf…” The “Jump to Recipe” button was great and it should be made mandatory by the United Web Standards Conference or whatever, but they don’t exist. So now they are being replaced by a feature that does something that they should have done — just give us the recipes. Serve the ads, fine. But we don’t need a story about your grandma’s favorite gravy or your dad’s home made barbecue sauce’s provenance, or that time you discovered marzipan at a cafe in New Orleans. They built something that was easily defeated by doing the same thing everyone else was doing and not even considering the future. This is on them, not AI.