Recipe Scammers Are Using an AI-Generated Emily Blunt as a Slop Puppet to Promote Their Garbage

A new report exposes thousands of scam websites flooding the web with AI-generated recipes.

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.

“We really approach this expecting these operators to try and hide their websites,” said Edwards. “These folks they don’t want people to know all of the websites they own.”

The slop recipe sites often have “aggressive” social media strategies, according to the report, with Edwards noting that the bogus brands are “super aggressive on Pinterest, super aggressive on Twitter, on Facebook.”

“Any place where there’s visual media,” he added, “you can expect these AI author people to be trying to drum up organic traffic.”

Among the most aggressive slop sites uncovered in the report is “AddCakes,” a baking site that claims it’s operated by a baker named “Elena.” Elena is described as a “busy mom who wanted to connect with my roots through baking, but got overwhelmed by complicated cake recipes and the pressure to make them look perfect.” But in an act of theft so bold that it’s comical, the character of Elena is clearly an AI-generated version of the extremely recognizable British actress Emily Blunt, who’s starred in hit movies like the 2006 “The Devil Wears Prada” and the 2018 “A Quiet Place.”

AddCakes is apparently either betting that no one will recognize AI-manipulated images of the famous celebrity, or banking that her face will attract readers. It’s even published photos depicting the Elena character in the kitchen cooking and sitting at a dinner table, surrounded by her fake, AI-generated family. According to location data from X-formerly-Twitter, the person behind the operation is based in Morocco. (Blunt doesn’t live in Morocco, and her representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Whatever you do, though, don’t trust the AI-generated Emily Blunt. As Edwards emphasized, websites working with Chinese and Russian adtech partners carry a privacy risk for consumers, as authoritarian regimes may look to hoover up valuable browsing data.

“This report is about publishers who are being deceptive. Their audiences could be impacted, advertisers are wasting money,” said Edwards. “But the underlying fact is also that if you load this website and you don’t block ads, your data is going to, basically, authoritarian countries.”

In other words, AI slop isn’t just choking the web with garbage. It can also come with security risks — and, at the end of the day, it’s built on fundamental dishonesty.

“Most of these AI recipe websites, when you look at those ‘about’ pages, the fake backstories that they’re putting together… this lady was a Michelin star chef and she worked at this fancy hotel or this place, and they’re basically saying that this expert not only wrote these recipes, but tested themselves. And it’s giving this air of, ‘Wow, you’re about to get a recipe from an expert. This has all been carefully vetted,’” said Edwards. “But none of these recipes have probably been cooked — zero of them by the actual owners or authors, and to me that’s the scary part.”

He added that many of these sites are likely scraping content ideas from real bloggers and creators who have actually taken the time, energy, and expertise to test, photograph, and publish real recipes. “These people are clearly not cooking their own recipes. They’re putting out sometimes dozens of recipes a day. It’s an automated publishing pipeline,” said the researcher. “It’s all a lie… and I think that the reason why we need to be holding AI publishers accountable is because they don’t care about their audience.”

More on fake authors and the web: Google Updates Guidelines to Punish Sites That Use Fake Bylines and AI-Generated Headshots