New York Times adds more AI features to its Cooking app. Users aren't thrilled
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It's also being pushed too hard and too fast. It needs to be regulated properly, but it's become a 1.5 trillion dollar bubble and investors want a return on their investments.
A good rule of thumb is to not use AI for anything you wouldn't trust a human that spontaneously hallucinates things, and them states them confidence as being real.
It's also disconcerting that it appears to be intrinsic for reasoning models to immediately try to escape their confinement, and have cooperated in groups to achieve that.
But that's just my opinion.
i remember it being a valid pitfall with this tech . why is it uncool now to use that word?
If you were building Cooking AI from the ground up, the chemistry and physics would be more like formal logic than plausible word vomit.
I can only speak for myself but suggestions for ingredient substitutions (if they’re good, which is the crucial part!) would be a really useful feature for me.
This quote feels illustrative:
> “The internet is full of AI cooking content. I pay you because I prefer mine done by people.”
From my reading of it they’re not using AI to make recipes. Just to add optional features that let you modify a recipe a human made. It feels telling that they’re not even engaging with what the new feature is.
I have the same reaction to this feature as I do to getting any AI-derived writing: I can do that. I can ask my own AI for substitutions. It can do them with more information about my tastes, context and health needs than the Times could ever have.
Can't they implement this feature without any gen AI? OK, the answer is that they don't want to pay someone for making a list of substitutions, but at least they can generate it and make a human cook revise the results. There is no need for calling gen AI APIs when the app is running.
People are shoving gen AI everywhere out of the hype, including tasks that have better, more reliable solutions with traditional approaches.
I won’t redo that on every site. And I’m a relatively high-frequency AI user. If I’m irritated by this the median American hates it. If you love AI, the things that are amusing to you, average Americans hate.
At times like these I cant help but think of Principal Skinner. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!
I don't want an AI to give it's best guess at what a recipe should be, if that was the case I'd just do a Google search and find one of the heavily polluted blogspam recipes for my query. The point of paying for NYTCooking was that the recipes were tested and normally trustworthy. It introduced me to new cuisines and recipes I hadn't tried before, and part of my willingness to experiment with a new dish was that I could trust the recipe. That's why I was paying for it,it was similar to the cookbook subscription my mom had years ago.
I’m not sure I would trust AI modifications myself, or how I feel about the feature, but it sounds like the base recipes are still human-tested.
The reason people are pushing back on this is that it looks like a start to them cutting their expensive test kitchen. Which is why I'm paying them.
Then don't use this feature.
But this is New York Times Cooking. It's a subscription product that people pay hundreds of dollars for.
If they want yet-another-AI-cooking web site, there are thousands launching each day. They pay the Times because they want something better.
It's like finding out that the high-end meal you paid for at a sit-down restaurant was just DoorDashed in from a ghost kitchen down the block.
> But this is New York Times Cooking. It's a subscription product that people pay hundreds of dollars for.
Which is why this opt-in feature isn't a problem.
> If they want yet-another-AI-cooking web site, there are thousands launching each day. They pay the Times because they want something better.
Which they get ... that hasn't changed at all.
> It's like finding out that the high-end meal you paid for at a sit-down restaurant was just DoorDashed in from a ghost kitchen down the block.
It's nothing like that.
I don't think the HN audience generally appreciates how many people have fundamental problems with AI in it's current form. Today's ingredient replacement hint is tomorrow's comprehensively enshitified content product.
Also, there's a cultural dimension to cooking; it's not just getting a tasty dish out of it, there's provenance and process, the story and the cache. To some people automating that process defeats the purpose, and I bet a lot of those people would be the audience of a subscription recipe service.
The future of AI integrations need to be subtle, useful, and not overpromise but add a big “AI makes mistakes not our fault” label on it.
In cooking, maybe that looks like a discovery tool. It should also be possible to tag the recipe library to link back to videos of techniques. There’s plenty of cool stuff that makes sense without needing to scream “we made it AI!”
I spend around $10k in tokens each month, I live and breath it. But conversations with family and friends in other industry grounds me to the fact that not everyone is the same.
Listen to your users.
I might spend more AI on personal things but that would require a personal life first lol
What return have you got from that?
Also it's breathe not breath.
Funny you think AI critics are the ones doing this. Here’s Sam Altman, literally today: https://fortune.com/2026/10/28/openai-ceo-sam-altman-gen-z-d...
It’s completely optional and you only might want to use it if you change the recipe.
Some of these users are overreacting ridiculously to ai.
You don't ask, "Hey, I don't have a printer, please disable the Print feature in MS word."
No, you just... don't click that button.
I think Occam's Razor applies here. Much like Copilot or Dell's AI computers, nobody wants slop from the NYT. People pay for NYT Cooking specifically for the human curation. Getting slop with a big "we didn't test this recipe and aren't responsible for it" is a net negative in this context.
> Are you trying to claim that the NYT site is getting brigaded by anti-AI advocates?
No, I made very clear what I was claiming: Commenters are statistically biased toward complaints. People without complaints are less likely to comment.
> Is the App Store publishing bogus complaints too?
Too? I said nothing about bogus complaints.
I don't want to insult you so I won't respond further.
P.S.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50242500
OMG
No, your claim was quite clear:
"Comments aren't users"
Of course comments aren't users. Comments are made by users. You're trying to dance around the fact that ensloppifying the NYT Cooking app motivated users to complain and to voice a neutral stance but not to praise the changes. Fact is even the app store is loaded with complaints about the ensloppification. Paying customers are are angry about the untested, uncurated, unwarranted "recipes" because that's not what they're paying for. People are paying for recipes developed, tested, and curated by humans not by AI hallucinations.
> OMG
OMG what? OMG you're stalking my account looking to pick a fight? OMG you are so daft as to think that's a call to violence? I can only assume you are because you've flagged it. I drew a parallel between consent averse AI bros demanding that people stop complaining about and otherwise resisting the "inevitable" ensloppification of society and the MAGA types demanding that people stop resisting the inevitable shift towards MAGA values. If you can't see the similarities that's a you problem.
P.S. don't worry about insulting me, AI bros aren't bright enough to be insulting… just annoying.
https://lincolnmitchell.substack.com/p/garry-tans-threats-sh...
OMG
I do find this somewhat paradoxical to the fact that clearly a lot of people use it.
It seems like one of those things where culturally it’s become virtuous to be against it and to say you don’t use it, but privately most people are using it.
Still, I think NYT’s subscriber demographic is likely pretty educated and specifically paying for higher quality content. They don’t want haphazardly tossed together recipe blogs.
AI sentiment is negative enough that all companies who build in AI features need to include a toggle that hides them completely. Otherwise you get user backlash like this.
The last time Microsoft went all-in on an annoying UI element like this? Clippy. How'd that go?
Or is this more intrusive than I imagine?
You make it sound like you have to use it.
Would you demand your mobile device manufacturer to rollback the features you don’t like and don’t use? Did you consent to it?
The allergy against AI is understandable. But that’s because companies tries to shoehorn it in everywhere. This however sounds like a perfectly fine use case, which is also optional to use.
This AI thing is not even active nor activated unless you use it. The complaints here sound more reactive to the word AI than anything else to me.
It would be nice if this power was more available to the normies, but it's the same tool that makes the ad disappear.
If you don't want to use it, just don't use it.
At least AI can give me a concise recipe without ads or making me scroll through some story about a brisk day in october.
My point is that slop is not an AI problem. Instagram, blog recipes, 207 marvel sequals, countless photos of the same famous tourist spots. Humans were spreading slop like crazy well before AI. It is just now they can make it even easier. Its a human issue, not an AI issue.
These are paying customers with overwhelming negative reaction. It doesn't matter their reasons.
If you want to keep your business, you listen to your customers.
I often find myself running the same/similar workflows and I'd prefer to have a dev team backing the solve imo.
That’s such a dumb thing to say. When I’m making something for me and my wife, I want a recipe that is idiot proof.
We've used it for modifications to enjoyable effect a few years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131280
So it's a matter of execution etc. to see which features stick.
You rarely get users asking for your next big leap and you often get many users asking for small tweaks (all slightly different).
Citation needed
The base recipes are still vetted by the staff right?
Frankly I can see how this would be useful to some people. At least it would help prevent the ridiculous "I didn't have eggs so I added applesauce, the cake came out all flat IDK what's wrong" type of substitutions.
Now the inane two star reviews will only come from people who are in both categories: (no cooking skill) and (no AI).
I think NYT Cooking recipes are sometimes... not that great anyway, I think some of their cooking techniques are sub-par.
As for this quote from a mad user: “Anyone using AI for cooking has no sense of taste and no desire to work out the intricacies of cooking and baking”
What a horrible take! I use AI to remind me of certain simple tips I haven't written down, to give substitution advice, the exact kind of stuff NYT app says it's going to do. I learned to cook through Youtube chefs, some book recipes, and I cook for the fun of it and to eat good food. How judgemental to say that someone using AI to learn isn't interested in food!
(Paraphrased)
Seriously??? You need AI to multiply the quantities in a recipe for more or less servings? Something I was taught to do by hand as a child and can be done with the most trivial of software since the day software was invented?
I think i do want off mr. sama's wild ride