Thomas Sixt

Koch seit 35 Jahren. Räume auf mit Küchenmythen, zeige echte Technik. Ohne KI. Manchmal doch mit Schaum.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@TEglinski Du hast Ja irgendwie garnix verstanden. Das erklärt er doch alles. Er war Teil des Systems.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@lilyraynyc @wilreynolds You get the feeling that everyone at Google is confused. They believe AI is the savior. But the results are even worse than before. And in many areas, they hadn’t been particularly good for years anyway.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@lilyraynyc Sell sell sell

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@lilyraynyc @thefox @rajanpatel And for 25 years, Google has been telling us what quality is supposed to mean, setting standards for everyone else while failing to live up to those same standards itself. The hypocrisy is outrageous. We should all seriously consider blocking Google entirely.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@ChefBillyParisi @inspiredtaste @lilyraynyc Thats bad again…

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@inspiredtaste @rmstein @rajanpatel Google go to hell

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

Yes, I think it’s great that you noticed this with The New York Times. I had exactly the same problem.

I marked parts of my recipes as subscription-only content and labeled them accordingly. In other words, these sections were locked for users who weren’t paying subscribers.

The end result was exactly what you’re showing now: Google displayed my exclusive cooking tips in its AI-generated answers.

Essentially, Google took content from a subscription page that was restricted to paying subscribers and displayed it right at the top of its AI responses.

As a result, I abandoned the entire experiment. Because how am I supposed to protect my content and offer it exclusively to subscribers if Google simply reproduces it in its AI answers?

In practical terms, this means you actually need two separate websites: one that is visible on Google and accessible to its crawlers, and another that is completely blocked from Google and everyone else, with access restricted exclusively to paying subscribers.

Until just a few months ago, implementing something like this was a technical nightmare, especially for an independent content creator or food creator, whatever we want to call ourselves.

What we really need is an international alliance of food bloggers, publishers, and magazines.

It shouldn’t just be the major publishing houses taking legal action against these practices. If we’re going to fight this, we should all do it together.

And that’s exactly what’s missing right now: a collective organization that allows us to take coordinated legal action against these practices.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@CyrusShepard 2029: Google realizes nobody is creating new content anymore.

2030: Google sends out its AI parrot to find out why.

2031: The parrot quotes a Google AI answer from 2026.

2032: Google has devoured the entire internet and is now selling its own bullshit as knowledge.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

Perhaps this is precisely their biggest strategic mistake: They believe they no longer need publishers and independent content creators, while their own business models still depend on the content these people produce. By destroying the economic foundation of their most important sources of information, they are ultimately putting the quality and value of their own products at risk. My photographic archive is 25 years old and contains more than 200,000 photographs.

200,000 times holding food in my hands. 200,000 times holding a camera. 200,000 file transfers. 200,000 times editing an image.

200,000 photographs. 25 years of work.

And then along comes the AI parrot, simply parroting what others have created.

Anyone who believes they can make the people who create knowledge, images, and content economically obsolete while continuing to profit from their work indefinitely is a complete idiot.

The parrot can squawk as loudly as it likes. Without the people who teach it something, sooner or later it will have nothing new left to say.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@JulianAdrat Ist doch kein Wunder, #MCDonalds schafft den #McRib ab, es ist zum verrückt werden.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@wutburgerlich @CarenMiosgaTalk Es bleibt nur Sauerkraut essen.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

In Frankreich geht die Welt unter, Petersburg brennt und @CarenMiosgaTalk wird über Bärbel gesprochen. Wahnsinn 🤯 #miosga

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@WolfMalca @aktuelle_stunde @WDR Sauerkraut echt

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

Da bleibt nur Sauerkraut

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

The problem, I believe, is that there is very little we can do about it. Google will make its own decisions. OpenAI and other AI companies will do the same. Large publishers can sue, negotiate, and sign licensing agreements. Small and independent publishers often don't have those options.
And this is no longer just about declining traffic or advertising revenue. It is about a much more fundamental question: how will the internet work in the future, and what role will independent content still play?
For many years, people have freely shared their knowledge, experience, and work on the internet. Search engines helped people find that content. Now that relationship is changing. Information is increasingly processed and presented directly by AI systems, without users ever needing to visit the original sources.
I believe we may be underestimating just how profound this change could be. It affects not only individual websites or business models, but the future of independent publishing itself.
After all, who will continue investing time, money, and expertise in creating high-quality content if that content is being used while its creators receive little in return?
Perhaps we are witnessing more than just a transformation of search. Perhaps we are witnessing a fundamental transformation of the open internet. And the question is whether we will still be able to publish freely and independently under anything resembling the conditions we once knew.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

Thank you for your feedback on my comments. I’d like to respond openly and honestly.

The truth is, the situation is already far worse than you describe.

I know of both smaller niche websites and major, well-established recipe portals that publish AI-generated recipes and images, some of which achieve excellent rankings and substantial growth. Some of these websites even produce their content entirely with AI.

My research goes back more than three years. Established recipe websites began publishing AI-generated images as soon as tools like Midjourney became available. To this day, I see no clear evidence in Google’s search results that it makes a meaningful distinction between recipes that have actually been cooked and photographed and content generated entirely by AI.

One particularly remarkable statement came from John Mueller in December 2023:

“If I noticed a recipe site were using AI-generated images, I’d assume all of the content is scraped spam and just go somewhere else.”

That was his personal opinion, not an official statement about Google’s ranking algorithms. Nevertheless, it stands in striking contrast to what I have been observing in search results for years.

My point is not that AI-generated content should automatically be considered inferior. The real question is: How does Google distinguish between genuine cooking experience and machine-generated recipes that merely sound convincing?

A recipe has to work in practice. Ingredient ratios, temperatures, cooking times, and preparation techniques need to be tested. That requires experience and expertise.

And this is where I see the fundamental problem with E-E-A-T.

Google repeatedly emphasizes the importance of experience, expertise, and trustworthiness. Yet I cannot see how the proven experience of a trained chef or the professional work of a qualified recipe editorial team is actually reflected in the evaluation of recipe content.

I find this development dehumanizing. It devalues the work of people who have spent years or decades cooking, photographing, testing, and publishing recipes. People whose knowledge comes from professional training, daily practice, and countless hours spent in the kitchen.

I understand that E-E-A-T is not a single ranking factor. But if Google publicly presents these principles as standards for high-quality content, it is fair to ask whether E-E-A-T in the recipe sector is anything more than a well-crafted PR narrative.

If entirely AI-generated recipes with no verifiable cooking experience can outrank the work of experienced chefs, what measurable value do experience and expertise actually have?

Or, to put it more simply: What does the first E in E-E-A-T really mean if genuine experience makes no discernible difference in search results?

That is a question I would genuinely like Google to answer.

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

@asoptionsell @lilyraynyc 🤮 “You’re supposed to create helpful content and keep getting better.”

[Thomas Sixt @sixtthomas]

Completely agree. Creating “helpful, satisfying” content that “users love” is an expensive, time-consuming endeavour.

Yet we all seem to be feeding the trillion-dollar machine for free.

And there’s another layer to this: publishers don’t just provide the content. We also carry the cost of research, expertise, photography, testing, editing, hosting and years of building trust with an audience.

The machine gets the content, learns from it and increasingly answers the user itself. The publisher gets fewer clicks.

At some point, we need to ask a very simple question: If the open web creates the value, why is almost all of the economic value captured somewhere else?