“We put a lot of effort into trying to tell you when not to do something if it’s no longer in the spirit of the recipe,” says Camilla Velasquez, the general manager of NYT Cooking.
For its recommendations, the LLM looks at the recipe itself, the Times’ ingredient substitution guide, user comments, and then what it calls AI “drawing on our expertise,” in that order. Velasquez says the AI should be a helper, not the main act, noting, “You shouldn’t be chatting with it.”
She explains that when the Times built the AI functionality, recipe editors helped create the original rule set, then evaluated how it worked at the end.
When I ask what this means for the jobs of 60 editors, writers, video journalists, and other employees—the team that creates the recipes people use and curates the vibe readers relate to—Velasquez stresses that NYT Cooking has been “hiring more than ever” and that it has “zero intention of publishing fewer recipes.”
So far, she says people are mainly using it for ingredient and equipment substitutions, along with adjusting recipes for dietary needs. “Some people use the chatbot to scale, or they’ll scale to match an ingredient,” giving the example of someone who had only one cup of oil for a recipe that needed more.
As a food writer whose career has taken some substantial turns due to AI recently, I wouldn’t say I’ve been clamoring for this, but I find the Times’ measured approach works pretty well.
I started testing it out by making chicken and dumplings using a five-star Alison Roman recipe with more than 6,000 ratings. I asked the AI tool to swap out bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs for boneless, skinless breasts. It thought about it for a moment—”simmering” in AI Cooking patois—and then offered up “Chicken Breast and Dumplings,” with the “breast” in the title rendered in the red-orange color that indicates a modification. Just below the title, it said it was “Joseph’s version made with AI. Not tested or endorsed by the original recipe’s creators.” Along with those visible changes, I could also toggle back and forth between my version and the original.