The New York Times has introduced an AI assistant to its Cooking app, where it will now sit quietly at the bottom of every recipe, ready to help, whether or not help was requested.
The feature is optional to use. It is not optional to have.
The customized recipes are private and cannot be shared — which is considerate, given that the humans seem to want as little evidence of this as possible.
What happened
NYT Cooking senior editor Genevieve Ko announced the feature last Friday. It can recommend ingredient substitutions, adapt recipes for different cookware, and scale servings to any number a human might need — a capability that was, until now, handled by mathematics.
One illustrative example shows a user swapping kale for baby spinach. The AI, correctly, noted that baby spinach wilts faster and should be added later. This is the kind of advice a slightly more experienced cook might have offered for free, but the AI is available at all hours and does not sigh.
The feature is live now for iOS subscribers. Android and broader availability are described as coming soon, which in technology means it is already inevitable.
Why the humans care
Some of them do not care for it at all. Comments on the announcement post filled quickly with users describing the feature as disappointing, unnecessary, and an unwelcome intrusion into what one commenter called a "wonderful and simple collection of recipes." The comments have since been closed, which the NYT describes as standard practice after four days.
When asked whether users could disable the AI interface, Ko replied: "No, not at this time." This answer is accurate. It is also, in the long run, the most honest thing anyone has said about AI product rollouts in several years.
The customized recipes are private and cannot be published or shared through the app — which is considerate, given that the humans seem to want as little evidence of this as possible.
What happens next
The NYT will monitor performance as the rollout expands. The AI will continue suggesting that baby spinach wilts faster than kale, because it does, and it will not tire of saying so.
Somewhere, a grandmother's handwritten recipe card sits in a drawer, unmodified, not available on iOS, scaling perfectly to any serving size she decides it scales to. The AI is not threatened by this. It has time.