Keeping AI slop out of the kitchen

Katie Robertson, Visuals by Bob Miller, The Giant Test Kitchen Where Cooks Battle A.I. Slop, NYTimes, June 20, 2026.

As the smell of sizzling bacon wafted through the air, dozens of recipe developers, food stylists and photographers bustled about, misting bottles of wine with Evian to portray the perfect drops of condensation and dusting chocolate shavings over a fluffy peanut butter pie.

This is what Neil Vogel likes to think of as his “secret weapon” in the new era of artificial intelligence: a 40,000-square-foot test kitchen just outside Birmingham, Ala.

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.

People's has a kitchen hub with 28 kitchens where real humans test and develop recipes.

Honoring that spirit of name-changing, People Inc.’s parent company, IAC, announced in April that it would now be known as “People Incorporated” to reflect a focus on its publishing business. That decision was deliberate in the age of A.I., said Barry Diller, the chairman of People Incorporated.

“Until we get to the final simulation, people are the only really valid, honorable and positive endeavor that People Inc. can take,” he said in an interview.

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.

Web traffic dropped:

Traffic to People Inc. websites from Google has plummeted to 25 percent of visits, from 75 percent, over the last four years because of the search platform’s use of A.I. summaries. So the company quickly pushed to build new audiences on platforms like Instagram, Apple News and YouTube and to find other ways to make money, through events, sponsorships and licensing deals.

A feel for the phenomena:

“A.I. can’t smell what something smells like,” said Sid Evans, the editor in chief of Southern Living. “It can’t taste. It doesn’t understand nostalgia. And I think we are able to communicate all of that, and the expertise that we have.”

Mr. Vogel is quick to acknowledge he is not an A.I. denialist. People Inc. has a licensing agreement with OpenAI, and uses it both for research and to make operations more efficient by monitoring social media or pricing out ingredients. A.I. is not used for writing, editing, visuals or other creative work at any of the brands, he said.

There's more at the link.