A London-based baker has officially put her foot down on AI-generated cake orders.
On Oct. 15, Reshmi Bennett, founder and head chef of bakery Anges de Sucre, posted about a very lengthy order inquiry a potential customer submitted via WhatsApp.
Sharing parts of the message on Instagram, Bennett says she’s implementing a new rule because of it.
“Our new Al cake policy will upset some customers,” she wrote. “It might even cost us the business we spent 16 years building.”
In an AI-generated brief, the customer inquires asks about a Kuromi-themed two-layer cake for a 13-year-old’s birthday party in three colors. (Kuromi is a Sanrio character known for her punk style.)
It goes into minute detail about everything, including the section called “Flavour and filling” — which contains 63 words — to request vanilla for the cake, filling and frosting.
“Taste is just as important as appearance, so I’m hoping for a moist, delicious cake with balanced sweetness rather than heavy icing,” reads the brief. “Please let me know if the fresh cream filling would be suitable for this style of tiered cake.”
“We really needed that tiered specified cuz otherwise I was gonna make it dry and yukh,” Bennett noted to her followers.
There are 10 sections, including requests for hearts to be “randomly but thoughtfully placed” and piping to be “elegant but subtle,” as well as several AI-generated cake images for inspiration.
The request, which TODAY.com has reviewed in its entirety, uses more than 800 words to order a vanilla birthday cake for 10 people. Bennett described it as a “dissertation.”
But it left out a crucial detail: the customer’s budget.
Bennett repeatedly requests it and eventually finds out the customer has £100-£150 to spend. Her custom cakes start at £300 for one tier and at £650 for two tiers. She estimates about £600 for the customer’s requested cake — and they decline.
“£100 is a considerable budget for a birthday cake, but the brief needs to match the budget,” Bennett wrote. “Our cakes online start from £100. But those don’t include the 70 minutes I just spent reading Al instructions.”
Bennett then establishes a new rule for ordering from her bakery: “Your cake brief cannot contain more words than your budget in pounds. £100? 100 words.”
She ends the post by warning customers who plan to submit AI-generated requests that the phrase “moist and delicious” is three words, so they should “choose wisely.”
The post went viral, with thousands of people in the comments section who are pretty split on the bakery’s new policy.
“People really have just given up on thinking and writing,” one user wrote.
Another commenter sided with the customer: “This feels like a mean-spirited take. AI is a plague, but so is any worldview that suggests those with less money deserve less opportunity to explain what they’re after. If their budget had been £850, and you’d taken the order, would you still be mocking them here?”
Bennett has the answer to that: It’s no, because the customer would have paid for her time.
“Yes, I would have been OK with it because I’m getting compensated fairly for reading 850 words of drivel,” she tells TODAY.com. “Sadly, money talks. If you want me to read garbage for 850 words, you need to come with a garbage budget.”
Bennett, who has made cakes with AI-generated images provided by clients, says the requests being created by AI is a new phenomenon for her.
There is now a term for AI-generated content the prompter fails to review before sending it to an unsuspecting person — slop grenade — and Bennett says she’s at the receiving end of it more and more with each passing day.
“I feel like it’s frivolous, especially now, when you can read it, and it is called slop for a reason,” she says. “The inquiries I’m getting, they’re so verbose and there’s so many words that mean so little. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where it ends.”
Bennett thinks AI is useful in some ways, but harmful in others — creativity being one of them.
“People love ordering a cake,” she says. “It should be something that you take personal interest in, not feed it into a robot and send me this long essay, which ultimately you spent three seconds doing, but I’m having to spend three hours figuring it out. It should be a joyful thing.”