// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
I Used NYT Cooking’s New AI-Powered Recipe Modifier, and It’s Actually Pretty Good
In an aside in the New York Times Cooking video I watched recently, where Melissa Clark made her lemony white bean soup with turkey and greens, the food reporter and recipe columnist invited viewers to leave a comment telling her what they do with the kale stems. It highlighted this sweet, funny relationship between a media brand’s personalities and its audience, a warm-casual vibe.
I am not among the multitudes in the Cooking section's commenter army, but a few days later I was very surprised to see some of them in open revolt. I was even more surprised to see why: In an iOS-only beta, the Times is now using AI to allow subscribers to modify recipes.
Below the article announcing the change on October 23, commenters loudly aired their grievances, threatening to cancel subscriptions, asking who wanted this, and how to turn it off.
After four days and 172 almost exclusively angry comments, commenting for the story was turned off.
The Times doesn't share Cooking's subscriber numbers, but NYT executive communications director Jordan Cohen said the site and app were visited 514 million times in 2025, and its YouTube channel has over 1.4 million subscribers. Reading over the section's AI plans and thinking about how many bungled attempts I'd seen to mush technology into places where it doesn't need to be in the kitchen, I guessed that I would side with the commenters. Then I tried the new AI feature, and found that it worked surprisingly well.
My writing for WIRED over the past decade has shown me again and again that adding tech to a kitchen product is risky at best. I've repeatedly watched companies try and fail: Bluetooth connections for all the appliances, apps that lean too heavily on crummy recipes, toasters with optical sensors or touchscreens that still couldn't toast particularly well. Just about anything that was part of the "smart kitchen" tended not to be very smart at all.
Developing dependable, delicious recipes is hard, expensive work that can require a whole staff. Yet skimping can hurt the brand. Two notable companies with a deep bench—The New York Times Cooking and America's Test Kitchen—are cooking content makers. Recipes, which is to say delicious, high-quality, tested recipes, are what they do.
Since AI is often a lousy chef, giving it a role in the presentation of NYT's gold mine of content is a big risk.
Earlier this year, the Times allowed AI to help with a recipe-scaling feature (modifying ingredient quantities so "serves 4" turns into "serves 6") and converting from imperial measurements to metric—cups, tablespoons, and Fahrenheit to grams, milliliters, and Celsius. Now, in the iOS-only beta, a "customize this recipe" field appears just above the ingredient list.
If you want to make banana bread but tell it you don't have a loaf pan, it'll ask you what kind of pans you do have, then modify the recipe to suit. All the changes throughout the recipe are noted in a visible red-orange text. Over several days of testing, I saw how you can do relatively simple things like swap ground pork for ground beef, or make more complicated demands like asking it to tailor things to your dietary needs. The modifications it makes are very visible throughout the recipe. If you ask it for something too out there—like turning Eric Kim's gochujang buttered noodles into a cookie—it gives you a "hard redirect" and points you to a better-suited recipe, which in this case is Kim's gochujang caramel cookies.