This YouTube Channel Gets Millions of Views for Its ‘Black Family’ Recipes — But They’re AI-Generated

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YouTube channel Potlikker (formerly The Hungry Historian) sells African American family recipes — but the videos are all made with artificial intelligence.

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@Potlikker_official on YouTube

Add TODAY to GoogleOct. 5, 2026, 10:56 AM EDT / Source: TODAY

Joseph Lamour

“Soul Food Project” podcast host Ian Yusuf found out about the YouTube channel “Potlikker” (formerly “The Hungry Historian”) from an unlikely source: an older relative.

“I was out at dinner with some family friends. We were all celebrating,” Yusef tells TODAY.com. “I was talking to them about the podcast and everything, and an elder family friend texted me later and said, ‘Check out this soul food YouTube channel.’ It was The Hungry Historian.”

Yusef says, when he got home, he visited the channel, which has since been renamed after a staple component of Black American cooking: Potlikker is the liquid left behind after cooking collard, mustard or turnip greens.

Yusef, who is Black, looked through the page’s thumbnails and felt something off about the titles, like “Big Mama vs Betty Crocker: 25 Dishes No Cookbook Ever Printed,” as well as captions attempting African American Vernacular English (AAVE), like “preacher came we ate good” or “big mama tricks.”

According to AI image and video detectors ZeroGPT and DeepAI, much of the content is AI-generated, including the thumbnails of elderly Black women, the “archival” clips in each video and even the main voiceovers.

According to ElevenLabs’s AI Speech Classifier, voiceovers on Potlikker are using its Attank voice, which is described as a “middle-aged Male with African accent.”

Everything on the channel aimed to highlight the culinary heritage of Black Americans — without using a single real person to do so.

“The fact that it was about food bothered me, but really the fact that they’re preying on Black elders is really what tipped me over the edge,” he says.

Using video-generation tools like Sora, image-generation tools like MidJourney and audio-generation tools like ElevenLabs, anyone with an internet connection can conjure up anything they like, which often leads to people pretending to be someone they aren’t.

Yusef says that while he did not find out whether or not the page’s owners are Black, the only photo he found associated with the page on social media was of the same white man.

At Potlikker, we tell African American history through the food that carried it: Sunday dinners, church suppers, Juneteenth tables, and the everyday cooking that became some of the best this country has ever known. Black cooks built the backbone of American cuisine and rarely got the credit. Families carried these traditions out of the South and rebuilt them in Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit.
Potlikker's Youtube Channel Description

All social media pages associated with that name have since been deleted, and the account owners never responded to our requests for comment.

“I did not even find out if they were real people,” Yusef says. “I emailed them asking politely if they could connect me with their family who have given them these recipes. They didn’t respond to me.”

At one point, the Potlikker page advertised a $17 soul-food cookbook, titled “Big Mama’s Soul Food Kitchen,” on the channel’s now-shuttered website.

An AI-generated cookbook cover.thehungryhistorian.com

“The frequently asked questions was like, ‘Can I afford this if I’m on a limited income?’ and it was like, ‘Yeah, of course you can,’” Yusef says.

While YouTube doesn’t allow impersonation of a specific individual’s image or voice, it doesn’t have any rules against pretending to be another race.

A YouTube spokesperson tells TODAY.com the channel has been demonetized following an internal review.

“We suspended the channel in question from our Partner Program, which means it’s ineligible to earn money from ads on YouTube,” the representative says. Suspended channels are eligible to reapply for YouTube’s Partner Program 90 days after suspension.

YouTube allows AI-generated and AI-assisted content to be monetized; however, it says it demonetizes low-quality content that is generic, repetitive or relies heavily on AI-generated imagery.

In January, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan wrote about the platform’s goal to reduce the spread of “low quality AI content” and said it was “utilizing established systems” that also combat spam, clickbait and repetitive content.

The announcement came after a November 2025 Kapwing study found 21-33% of YouTube’s feed may consist of AI slop or brainrot videos.

Yusef and YouTuber and filmmaker Cam James, who also dug into the provenance of the Potlikker page on his channel, note that the digital cookbook listed a private company named “Hiraya Media Ltd,” which is located in Agios Athanasios, Cyprus. (Hiraya Media Ltd did not immediately respond to TODAY.com’s request for comment.)

“I do every aspect of the videos I make: I write, I film, I edit, I even make the thumbnails,” James tells TODAY.com. He adds that AI has a negative cultural impact in addition to its negative environmental effects. “It’s direct theft from artists like me who do all the work ourselves.”

James says pages like Potlikker are doing even worse than that.

“There’s this deep kind of culturally Black veneer on this lie, on this scam, that hits me in a personal place,” he says. “Now you’re talking about my ancestors and civil rights history, and the whole time it’s someone behind the channel pretending to be us, and what’s worse is there are people in the comment section and sharing this stuff who believe it.”

Baratunde Thurston, writer, host of the show “Life With Machines” and speaker who explores how humans live with technology, says that non-Black people have unfairly profited off of Black people and culture for centuries, but the internet has made it even easier them to do so.

“Paul Mooney really said it succinctly, right?” Thurston tells TODAY.com. “Everybody wants to be Black, but nobody actually wants to be. Everybody wants the flavor, but nobody wants to actually pay for the meal.”

Thurston notes the “tug of admiration and disdain” behind it. “The original minstrelsy was about belittling, but also, I think, highlighting the dependency this whole society had on Black people as servants and nannies and chefs and like all the s--- these people were trying to do for themselves.”

He explains that past exploitations actually took a little effort, but now it’s easier than ever to deceive others by entering a prompt or two into an AI chatbot.

“You get the extraction without any interaction,” Thurston says.

“It’s the completion of a colonial project where you actually get to mine the Black body without dealing with any Black bodies, and you get to create a stereotype that you’ve always kind of lusted after,” he continues. “You don’t have to apply shoe polish; you don’t have to deal with casting; you don’t have to deal with anything human. You can just generate it. You can manifest your own twisted version of us and make money.”

Yusef says he’s kept an eye out for similar channels and found a similar-looking “Mexican cooking” YouTube page selling a $60 cookbook with AI-generated photos and recipes.

“Imagine future generations trying to source documents and history and finding this stuff coming up,” Yusef says. “You end up with garbage becoming the norm.”

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Joseph Lamour

Joseph Lamour is the food reporter at TODAY.com and is based in Washington D.C.