How we use AI
The short version
- AI helps us write our Untested recipes, and they always say so.
- Images made with AI are always labeled “AI-generated image”. Photos labeled “Illustrative photo” are real photos, not AI.
- Votes, ratings, Clone Scores and rankings come only from real people. AI never invents them.
- Automatic checks look at everything people send us before it goes live. If we turn something down, you can ask a person to look again.
- We never send your email address, IP address or device ID to an AI service.
- On social media, we use each platform’s AI labels.
The basics
DupeEats runs with a lot of automation. Scheduled software publishes the monthly rankings, reads the news sources we follow, puts together and sends The Friday Drop, and checks what people send us. Most of that is ordinary software following fixed rules. Some of it uses AI, and this page tells you exactly where.
Our rule is simple: AI can help us write and check things, but it never makes up the numbers or the opinions you see here. And when an automatic check isn’t sure, nothing gets published.
Recipes
Every recipe shows where it came from:
- Untested
- A starting point written with AI help, using public information about the original menu item, and checked automatically against our recipe rules, such as a complete ingredient list and method, and no health, diet or nutrition claims. Nobody has cooked it yet. Make it, rate how close it gets, and the community’s ratings become the real test.
- Community dupe
- Written and cooked by a home cook who shared it with us. We may use automated tools to tidy up formatting and units, but the recipe is theirs, and it’s credited the way they chose.
- Tested by DupeEats
- Cooked by a real person and compared side by side with the original. We only use this label when that has actually happened.
More in our Editorial standards.
Images
You’ll see three kinds of pictures on DupeEats:
- Real photos of the actual dish, mostly shared by home cooks. They have no label.
- Illustrative photos: real, freely licensed photos of a similar kind of food, used when we don’t have a photo of the exact item. They’re labeled “Illustrative photo” and listed on our Photo credits page. These are not made with AI.
- AI-generated images: used only on Untested recipes, and always labeled “AI-generated image. Nobody has cooked this recipe yet.” A recipe with an AI image is kept out of search results, and the AI image is never used as the preview when the page is shared.
Our share cards, ranking images and social covers are drawn by our own templates from real data. They aren’t generated by AI.
Moderation
Every debate, recipe and photo people send us is checked before it goes live. Automatic filters turn away things our community rules don’t allow, such as banned words, links and spam. Everything else waits in a review queue and isn’t published until it’s approved.
We plan to add an AI moderator to these checks. When we do, this page will say so and explain what it sees. It will never see your email address, IP address or device ID.
Some steps are fully automatic. For example, when we receive a complete copyright notice, the content comes down automatically as a precaution while we look at it. None of these decisions has legal effects on you beyond what you shared on DupeEats. If we turn down or remove something you shared and we have your email address, we tell you why, whether automated tools were involved, and how to ask a person to review it. See Appeals in our Terms of use.
New menu drops
Today, our short stories about new menu items are written automatically from fixed templates, using the headlines of the public sources we follow and our own product catalog. They don’t use AI. Every story links its sources and says how it was written. Here’s how we cover new menu drops.
In the future, we may use AI to help write these stories. If we do, each story will say so, every fact will have to come from the sources it links, and an automatic check against those sources will run before it’s published. AI won’t add prices, taste opinions or anything the sources don’t say.
Other automation
- Rankings are calculated with a published statistical method from real votes. No AI is involved. Here’s how we count.
- The Fast Food Wrapped quiz works out your result with fixed scoring rules, not AI.
- The Friday Drop is put together automatically from what we published that week, using fixed templates.
Social media
Our posts on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest are made automatically from what’s on the site: debate results, rankings, new menu drops and community dupes, always with the cook’s credit. A person reviews our videos. When a post includes realistic images, video or voices made or changed with AI, we use the platform’s own AI label.
What AI never does here
- Invent votes, ratings, Clone Scores, ranking positions, reviews, testimonials or quotes.
- Pretend to be a home cook, or post a recipe or photo in someone else’s name.
- Claim a recipe was tested by a person when it wasn’t.
- Write about health, diets, calories or nutrition.
- Use your email address, IP address or device ID.
We also don’t sell what you share with us, or let others use it to train their AI models. See the Community content license.
Questions
If you think something on DupeEats is AI-generated and not labeled, or a label is wrong, email us at dupeeats@gmail.com with the link.