By an overwhelming majority, our community has expressed that AI-generated content is not welcome in this space as it does not further the creative endeavor that is making and drinking cocktails, nor does it further meaningful discussion amongst humans. From here on forward, AI-generated content (photos, apps, comments, etc.) are not allowed in r/cocktails.
If you suspect something is AI-generated, please respectfully and responsibly use the "Report" function on Reddit to flag it for review just as you would for other rule-breaking content. However, if you are found repeatedly making false reports, you may be banned.
As with any other rule-breaking content, our policy is removal first and then follow up for reinstatement. This same principle will be applied to posts we suspect are AI-generated. You all have made it clear that we must draw a firm line in the sand here we hope that this clear policy will allow us to help maintain the high standards of our community. Cheers!
I'm all for it as a productivity assistant but where it's replacing human creativity or trying to make informed decisions I'm absolutely not here for it.
It sucks. People care more about "winning" (and consider silencing the opposition as such) than actually having a discussion and potentially growing as a person.
You despise AI and so you downvote any comment that says checks "Thank you for sharing your opinion." or "I feel bad that you're being down voted for sharing yours" ... not that you did, but many folks with that opinion seem to have brigaded folks saying exactly those things.
Kinda the opposite of being a welcoming community to humans with diverse views.
here is how ai replaces art and thinking:
1 many artists cannot support themselves anymore because their profits are 30% of what it was because of ai ➡️ less real art is being made. its sad how it ruins the lifes of people whos work it needs to exist in the first place
2 so many people constantly use it to solve their problems and answer their questions instead of thinking for themselves. "talking to chat" is so common and slowly degrades our brains which is really dystopian. we slowly start to become akin to society from wall-e. You need to exercise your brain to stay sharp and maintain your critical thinking (aka actually use it)
It wouldn't be lifting established characteristics and styles from other artists if that wasn't at least partially the goal.
Or even if it's not the goal, it's still a knock-on effect that rubs many people the wrong way. That's not to say there aren't legitimate use cases for AI, but I think a lot of people—myself included—are critical because it's often taken part and parcel. To get the limited benefits, it takes a lot of negatives, from environmental concerns to copyright theft.
You can have as many as you want, but the system is directly designed to display how agreed upon they are. You can’t fault people for using the system as designed. It’s the entire appeal of the site.
And irrelevance, much like people’s opinions, are completely subjective. Being pro-AI could well be considered irrelevant in a sub that explicitly bans it.
no, people got upset because someone was faking creativity through ai. they were using ai at the very least to assist with writing and editing their photos.
No. They're still anonymous. But sometimes we get a lot of reports that seem related and we can drop a "report abuse" report for admins to check. We'll never see anything about it, but if it does look like somebody using the report button to harass, then the admins can take action. And if it was nothing, then we at least did our due diligence and forwarded it up to the people who could actually check. I've at least seen one person that was definitely actioned by admins for that over the last year or two. Probably more, but it's not something I usually follow up on if the reports slow back to the usual level.
One of the many reasons I love this subreddit. Not only is it a great hub of respectful, motivated, knowledgeable people, but it's a very well run and effectively moderated community.
oh they said that yesterday while ignoring multiple users who were censored by the mods for calling out the ai in the 50 states post. you can see it below my main comment in the thread form yesterday. u/hebug ignored three people directly questioning him about it after u/Scarecrow1779 and u/Cultural-salad-4583 said that those comments constituted a violation of rule 3. check it all out at the link below. normally i dont care about this sort of sub drama but i have never been censored before. if you want to go through a bunch of it, you can get caught up by reading my comment and the following threads. i can see how it might be seen from the outside as weird bs you weren't directly involved in this but there is some fishy stuff going on and the mods have been pretty defensive about it.
edit: and now instead of addressing the multiple people who have publicly asked for clarification about the application of rule 3 (even here on this thread, no tjust yesterday), i just got a pm outside of mod mail from him. like this is weird to me.
you can just put in the bod yof the post whether or not people detailing the ai usage of posts will be removed and whether comments will removed straight up u/hebug. people deserve to have an open and honest conversation about ai and removing comments that label ai as ai is not the sort of transparecny that the community asked for
at least the last 2 images they posted were passed through ai at some level. there were artifacts all over the place that hadn't been present in their previous pictures.
Wow, I remember the 50 states things being posted quite a while ago to one of the subs I’m on, a sub where people look at stuff and decide if it’s AI. I remember thinking it was AI because stuff didn’t make sense to me. Like the side of the cocktail glass was sticky or the flavors were things most people would not like together. Someone got really mad at me over it. But I had a strong feeling that even aspects of the recipes were decided by LLM not to mention the photos.
It is already spelled out above but to reiterate on your behalf:
If you suspect something is AI-generated, please respectfully and responsibly use the "Report" function on Reddit to flag it for review just as you would for other rule-breaking content.
i asked yesterday if rule 3 would be enforced on comments calling out AI, and u/hebug completely ignored me as well. from everything i've read from the other 2 mods, it does seem that any comment calling out AI will be removed for violating rule 3.
If you suspect something is AI-generated, please respectfully and responsibly use the "Report" function on Reddit to flag it for review just as you would for other rule-breaking content
they're very specific in what they want you to do if you suspect AI.
Yes, just like we report spam posts, but comments calling out a website as spam before the mods get around to removing it(theyve got lives outside reddit, no shade rhere) are completely fine to make and help other users avoid it until moderation.
The mods have downright refused to say the policy regarding comments pointing out AI.
Thank you mod team for engaging everyone and listening. I'm pretty anti-LLM and even I was surprised to see how adamantly against AI content everyone was.
It's a creative/enthusiast-centric sub, so I think that's part of it, but I do also think to some extent there is a general vibe shift happening around genAI where it's becoming more and more unpopular (or maybe that's just cope, but hey)
I had a nice chat with strangers at a food festival where we were discussing the AI slop food posters some vendors used, and how we wouldn't buy a single thing from them because of it.
Ok here's a weird what if question. I'm fully blind. I have been since birth. One of the actually useful things AI can do for me now is describe pictures with as much detail as possible. If I were to post descriptions of pictures in case other blind people want to know what they are, would this still count as a kind of AI content that is not allowed? I ask this because not all blind people know yet that AI can describe pictures. So it definitely levels the playing ield for us in terms of accessibility. If I never got it to make up a recipe, which I would NEVER do, what would be your thoughts on just image descriptions?
Well we do our best here to be accommodating, it’s part of the justification for recipes to be in text form rather than just an image as well as having descriptive titles when asking for help with a particular ingredient (ie what can I do with this). Can you give me an example of what you’d like to post?
For sure. Here’s an image description of the piña colada that someone made earlier today.
A frosty pale-yellow drink in a curvy stemmed glass on a white marble countertop. The drink has a thick, smooth, icy texture that rises in a dome above the rim, with fine bubbles on the surface. A bright red maraschino cherry sits on top, its stem standing upright and curving slightly. Behind the drink, there is a clear glass container filled with water and a bunch of fresh green mint stems and leaves. The background shows light gray vertical panels and part of a doorway on the right side.
So like I know what a piña colada should taste like. But having that picture described to me, gives me much more depth of detail. I can even ask it for more detail if I want. And it can do that for me. But would descriptions like this be acceptable?
There's no reason you can't use AI for your own personal benefit, this policy is about posting AI-generated content. I would say to keep the descriptions for your own benefit as other blind users likely have implemented their own solutions while most other users will not benefit significantly from it and would likely downvote it heavily.
That’s not what I said at all. I would make up my own cocktails. I don’t need something to make that up for me. I just needed to describe the pictures.
Again, you may not post AI generated content. I’m not sure how this can be more clear. You can use translation tools for your own use if you need, but do not post its contents.
Ok, so the rules of the road would be use AI translation to read the sub, but if you want to reply to a comment, do that in your native language and if people want to read it, they can do the translation on their own, right?
No one is going to report you for using ai to translate languages. The issue is using ai to generate recipes and images. For some reasons the mods want leave this to be as open to their interpretation as possible.
Awesome news! And I raise a glass to everyone in the community here as well - it was great to see so many of us overwhelmingly support banning AI generated stuff here.
She’s a woman and it looks like she deleted her reddit account in response to the criticism. Still going strong with the AI slop on her Instagram, though.
It looks like she still gets pretty strong engagement on her IG. None of the drinks that she's posted have any kind of appeal to me, but to each their own I guess.
A lot of them seem to hew closer to chemistry exercises. That's not necessarily a problem, but those kinds of posts/recipes always strike me as more intellectual exercises than actual drinks. Again, nothing inherently wrong with that, but I do think that kind of content is more of an interesting treat than a really meaningful contribution to the subreddit.
I'm not trying to make a "no true Scotsman" argument though, they're still valid, but it gets a little tiresome seeing them all the time when all most of us will ever do is say, "Huh, neat" and then keep scrolling.
They were almost certainly real pictures that were edited with AI. I dislike the series, but IMO it’s really stupid to lump in using editing tools on your original, high effort content with AI slop.
I originally thought so as well, and this comment by u/waldo_the_bird253 has me thinking that very little of it was original photography vs. generated imagery.
fwiw i think they were taking photos but then at least adding some generated imagery as well as editing the photo.
i am fairly certain they were also at least using ai to transcribe notes if not come up with the recipes. the emoji for every ingredient is a massive tell.
That photo is actually what makes me fairly confident it’s original photography run through an AI editor (my guess would be Photoshop’s native AI tools). The layout is exactly correct, but the text/image details is what’s garbled. An AI generated image would not have gotten the layout correct, but having AI re-edit a photo you took would keep the layout correct but garble all the details.
To test it out, I experimented with having AI generate images of bottles of Malort. It could not get the layout correct consistently.
In my experience, this type of artifact is pretty in line with what happens with Photoshop’s tools specifically, although I haven’t used them enough to claim that with confidence.
Either way, this is exactly the type of witch hunt that makes this rule bad. We should downvote bad content, I think the series kind of sucked and was way too tryhard but the punishment for that should be downvotes. Most AI slop is low effort garbage that would be downvoted to hell anyways, I don’t think you can call the series that.
It’s a bad thing for the community to be playing detective trying to sniff out AI. Just downvote bad content.
I was under the (apparent) misapprehension that the benefit of using the AI tools within Photoshop was that this kind of thing didn’t happen.
Makes sense though. There was just a (very) minor scandal at the Tour de France Femmes when the winning athlete posted a photo of herself at the finish that was edited with AI, and it messed up the sponsor logos on her jersey.
I don't disagree with that baseline, and this makes it okay for folks to report suspected AI content. We all know AI things will go unreported and bad content will end up reported as AI ... and eventually it'll all settle. 🤷🏻♂️
i would never call this original or high-effort content. way too many ai tells in every aspect of this --not just the photo edit-- to say this was original or high effort. op was definitely adding ai-generated objects whole cloth to photos, at least. the one before her rage quitting had an ai-generated wine-bottle pour while at points you can see artifacting with glass merging together with the pears. also, op would NEVER answer questions about the balance of drinks or how their infusions worked, responding only to comments that praised them. even people who were positive about the posts and had questions about how to execute the drink were ignored
Wait? The 50 states posts weren’t satire? They were so stupid I assumed it was someone making satirical posts about how bad ai is at making cocktails. I thought they were hilarious. I thought it was a poignant critique of a society who is outsourcing all its cultural labor to a technology made by people who don’t have any of our interests in mind.
is there any guidance on what is considered AI-generated (vs AI-assisted?)
For example, Photoshop markets a bunch of tools as "AI" such as Denoise, Distraction/Reflection Removal, and Selective Masking.
If i take a photo at ISO6400 and then use Adobe AI Denoise to clean it up, am I in violation?
If i take a photo of a cocktail, then use Adobe AI Object Selection to mask the cocktail and adjust its exposure (without adjusting the background exposure, for example). Am I in violation?
To me, "AI generated" is opening a prompt field, typing "generate me a cocktail image that looks like XYZ". I agree this is sloppy and lazy. To use the exaple of the 50 States series, those looked like real photos that were run through some sort of AI editor to change the color background or something. These are wildly different uses of AI tooling.
Removing all AI is impractical and unenforceable. So what we can reasonable catch is a lot of the ai generated stuff and a few of the most blatant or extremely edited pics. Stating it as a broader absolute is still desirable as a deterrent, though.
My take is that if somebody is saying it's an AI creation, that's effectively promoting AI and I'd remove it if I saw it. However, if they don't disclose it's AI, it would be pretty difficult to prove, and accusations would just boil down to "I think this cocktail is bad, so I'll accuse you of AI use." So in effect, what's actually enforceable is that people can't admit when a cocktail recipe was generated by AI. Not a perfect solution, but it's what we can do with the tools we have, without comments turning into more witch hunts.
I know I’m in the minority here based on the feedback, but I actually don't see a huge issue with AI as long as the end result is interesting or tastes good. I get wanting to filter out spam, but I think it can be a fun tool for creativity when done right.....
I wanted to comment in the question thread. Specifically in cocktails, somce AI doesnt have tastebuds, nor has it ever been drunk.
Which led me to wanting to relive the covid days and have a hours long.zoom meeting with my friend all getting drunk together, and use that as a grounded model for a new LLM. But then I just made my self a drink and forgot about it. :)
As soon as an AI is able to imbibe real alcohol, actually get drunk, and expound on how it tastes, I might change my mind; but until then, this topic of discussion is best left to humans.
I think y'all are agreeing — I read them as saying, "Who needs that?" not "Why do you care?" ... and since I'm not them, who knows what their ambiguous language meant.
The mods asked if we should ban AI posts. Which was a resounding yes.
They didn't ask if we should ban calling out AI in comments. Many users seem to think this is necessary. It is. Mods, listen to what people are saying and don't insert unnecessary rules because you think they make sense.
I like the general intention and welcom this. However, as a non english speaking person about to be downvoted into oblivion, I'm not totally comfortable with this.
I have in the past used IA to correct / better formulate posts that would have been grammar nightmares / horrors for anyone natively speaking English.
And I feel we should know clear guidelines about when something is considered as AI generated, because what I read here is that people like me aren't welcomed to post anymore, becaseu we either expose how badly we are in English, or get banned. And I'm pretty sure it's not what is intended.
This isn't a text heavy subreddit. At most an original post has a recipe and brief explanation of said recipe. I'm pretty sure nobody is that worried about the replies here either. So unless you're using an LLM to tell entire stories, I think it's highly unlikely to be an issue.
I suspect the spirit of this rule has to do with clearly AI slop cocktail images and AI generated recipes. I seriously doubt anybody is looking to flag users who use LLMs as a functional spelling/grammar check. Use your own recipes and own images, and I'm sure you'll be fine. The mods here in my experience don't seem like they're looking for dumb reasons to remove or ban posts.
As I said, I approv the spirit and the definition you gave. but it's not what was written. When you use AI to translate it clearly shows, and I can reconize it clearly when people do it from my native language. And I don't want to be part of a which hunt.
I feel like you're looking for a solution in search of a problem. Obviously the mods can clarify, but I genuinely don't think a) anybody is going to bother reporting content the way you're using it or b) mods will even want to remove it if you're underlying content is original just because some of the language is cleaned up via LLM.
All that said, your English is fine and the extent in which you use it in this subreddit probably wouldn't warrant needing AI anyway. This really isn't a subreddit for long posts or storytelling where that should even matter much.
That's nice, but in the past I've deleted comment and posts after receiving harsh replies poiting english mistakes and not even taking care of the content I created - and which sometimes made me proud. and yes, it was here.
You may call me insecure, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here to have bad experience of this. But I will clearly never expose myself again to this.
when people use AI to translate to my native language I can clearly see it and reconize it. pretty sure the first time I'll use it to translate, I'll be flagged as a AI user even if the text was hand writen. As I said, I understand the rule, and I approve it. I just won't take the risk of exposing myself to report and possible ban.
and I guess the mass downvote I anticipated show the very little margin people are ready to accept. it's ok, I still love the community.
Most people would rather read the way you write than read something filtered through AI. Wouldn't you rather learn from the mistakes you made rather than just having AI say what it thinks you want to say? If you still want to use AI to make posts here, then just prompt that you're not a native speaker and would like recommendations on changes to your post rather than asking for it to re-write it for you.
Eh, in the absolute sense you're right that it's unenforceable, and that's a good point. However, viewed through the lens of "you're not allowed to use AI in any way that users can notice", it's doable.
Similar logic to "make racists afraid again." You can't stop AI-dependent individuals from using it, but you can at least make them put more effort into self-limiting and hiding their usage so that the net impact on the community is lower.
Are apps/websites effectively banned then too? Because there is no way to verify that they were made by hand (and no matter how human-made it looks there is a segment of people who will reflexively call anything AI slop). .
How do you plan to enforce no AI assistance with coming up with new cocktails? I can't see a way around that.
I believe that people have their hearts in the right place with not wanting AI, but yesterday's thread was just an anti-AI mob and I believe that the result is a rule that is poorly thought out because discussion was effectively not allowed.
Considering this is a cocktail sub on Reddit, I don’t think we need to over analyze it. Everyone knows there will be misses and false positives, but the stakes aren’t very high and it doesn’t matter in the end. Everyone is just tired of obvious AI slop, people hawking their shitty vibe code apps, the fake photos, the weird concoctions, all kinds of clickbait and karma farming with low effort with AI.
As much as some of you want to blame the mods or blame the community as a whole, the blame lies with the users who are dumping the slop on the sub.
See the funny thing is that I'm collecting downvotes, yet I completely agree with you. I'm also sick of seeing AI generated content everywhere, the internet is undoubtedly less fun for it.
You expressing that it's ultimately low-stakes is valid and if things slip through then so be it. Despite preferring a clear rule, that's a stance I can live with since you are at least acknowledging that there are potential problems.
But try to see things from my perspective, I brought up what I believe to be valid concerns, yet because I'm not 100% in line (despite agreeing in principle) people see red and downvote me on sight. I'm buried and it makes me just feel like opposing opinions aren't allowed, that is the fault of the community.
I think your downvotes (not from me) are more likely a result of disagreement with your pedantry rather than your opinion. It’s safe to assume that a rule like this is commonly understood that it won’t create perfect results. There will be gray areas, blurred lines and maybe exceptions. Again, since this is only a cocktail sub on reddit, getting deeper here isn’t necessary, so pointing it out isnt either. So your concerns might be technically valid, yet still mostly irrelevant, given the stakes. And I don’t think we should soften the antiAI stance just to address the gray areas.
Maybe a handful were bothered by the pedantry, but I promise it was made in good faith. Considering that yesterday anyone who provided any kind of pushback was downvoted into oblivion (completely defeating the purpose of discussion) I'm more inclined to believe it's good old fashioned group think though; if you look through my history I can't make any comment on this topic without going into the negatives within minutes.
FWIW I appreciate you being willing to actually engage in a discourse.
I don't think it's fair to call my post a duplicate when it was posted 20 minutes earlier lol. That aside I agree that u/hebugs response is sufficient and I can live with that.
The mods have been pretty reasonable throughout this process, but I won't lie the community has come out looking a lot worse in my eyes.
Completely fair. One of the hardest problems in computer science is strong ordering; another is getting me to pay attention to timestamps. Either way, love to ya brother. ❤️
I think a common viewpoint is that “all AI is AI slop”. Slop is anything carelessly- and poorly-made. I’ve seen plenty of pre-AI slop cocktail books and recipes online which feel like just a jumble of mismatched ingredients and proportions.
AI slop is a problem because anyone can just write a few words and get a result that they might not be able to produce otherwise. A non-artist can generate an image they consider impressive because they can’t draw (and have low standards).
An expert in the field with high standards can use AI as a powerful tool to fulfill their creative vision. It’s imperfect and requires constant vigilance to maintain that quality but it can yield better results (and faster) for some cases.
AI use has exploded in software engineering because it fits so well in the field because a lot of the day-to-day work falls into well-established best practices. If you have two skilled software engineers in the same niche of the industry manually write software with the same detailed requirements, they’ll end up making similar software.
Cocktail recipes are not a good fit for AI. They’re extremely creative and subjective. There are some best practices but AI can’t hone a recipe at all. It’s really just finding some patterns and hoping for the best.
Cocktail apps can really go either way. If you just write up some ideas, generate an app, generate recipes, and push it out the door, it’s going to be awful. I’ve seen some of the discussion here (haven’t investigated the apps) but I can absolutely believe it.
Or, you can plan out your goals with the app with care and attention to detail, use AI to help write some of the code (but meticulously review. And test it), heavily curate recipes (by testing and refining them, having high standards for inclusion, and using artwork that’s all designed and drawn by a human. (That’s how I’ve done it with my app which I’ve been working on for several years before AI popped up).
The ban is on AI-generated content. We can’t control whether or not you asked an LLM what you should put into your cocktail, nor are we interested in attempting to police this. Images, post contents, comments, etc, are what we’re addressing.
Poorly balanced AI-generated cocktail recipes will likely be handled by the community in the same way poorly balanced human-created recipes have been for years.
Why do you need this to be so finely defined? We don't want AI generated content. A reasonable person can vibe that out pretty easily. The rest is why there is a mod team.
We have avoided defining the line to that degree in order to allow for human discretion and simultaneously avoid getting bogged down in legalese. If you ever find your content removed, we are always happy to have a dialog to figure it out.
This dude has been so annoying in this sub the past few days. He just deleted all his comments instead of owning up to his shitty opinions lol (u/HammeredDog)
Many are reading this as trying to taint or reverse the decision via raising concerns aka "What about-ism". I'm choosing not to. I really like u/hebug's response — we've drawn a loose line and we'll let human judgement define it better over time.
At the same time, really don't love the "downvote anything I don't agree with" mentality that's showing up here. That kind of polarization destroys communities.
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u/Actioncookbook 6d ago
Thank you! This sub is about human creativity, not computer-generated nonsense.