The Giant Test Kitchen Where Cooks Battle A.I. Slop

The New York Times explores the test kitchens of Big Medium’s longtime client People Inc. to explain the how and why of creating tons of original recipes to counter an onslaught of AI slop.

With traffic from Google plummeting and the interwebs clogged with synthetic recipes, People Inc is betting that audiences will respond to quality hand-made content within a user experience that’s so good they won’t bother with Google. They’ll come straight to the source.

Mr. Vogel, the chief executive of People Inc., one of the country’s biggest digital and print publishers and the home of brands like Food & Wine, People, Entertainment Weekly, Allrecipes and Southern Living, has already seen chatbots upend search traffic and A.I.-generated slop flood the internet. And he is betting that readers would rather make a recipe created by someone who knows how to handle a chef’s knife than one generated by a robot. …

The Birmingham facility develops some 1,800 new recipes a year and tests an additional 5,300. Downstairs is a prop storage room, bursting with a rainbow of crockery, glassware and table linens in every fabric imaginable. The facility also has a “lab” that has evaluated more than 3,000 products to date, mostly kitchen appliances. …

To encourage readers to keep returning to its websites, People Inc. started MyRecipes, a free product that allows them to save recipes from the publications; it now has more than three million users, Mr. Vogel said.

It’s the same play that proved successful when we designed the company’s People mobile app: a trove of original content in a compelling new presentation. The strategy is working. People Inc. has seen ten straight quarters of digital revenue growth while other publishers and media companies are struggling.

For creative and product people, there’s a lesson that goes beyond publishing: use human smarts and heart for creative content, and use AI to help find it and present it through exceptional experiences. AI doesn’t have to replace content creation; instead, it can elevate great (human) content through newly possible presentation.