AI solves my most annoying chore: Meal planning for a toddler

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It is 8:15 on a Monday morning, and it is my turn to take my 20-month-old daughter to daycare. I have a phone meeting in 15 minutes, we have to leave right after, and I didn’t prepare anything for her lunch.

Previously, this would cause a minor panic: What do we have in the refrigerator? What can I make quickly? Is it healthy? Has she eaten anything similar recently? Are any of these ingredients on the school’s list of forbidden allergens? Now when I need to figure out what to cook for my kids, I ask artificial intelligence. “I need to make lunch for my daughter for daycare in a hurry. Here are some ingredients I have, but feel free to ask me if I have others," I tell Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.

Mini egg muffins, it suggests. “That’ll take too long." Quick egg salad? “I don’t have any hard-boiled eggs." Scrambled-egg wrap? “Perfect. Tell me how to add some vegetables." Ten minutes later, lunch is cooked and packed.

And when my daughter comes home, most of her lunch has been eaten. Success! You have probably heard about the brilliant things generative AI can create, from eerily realistic podcasts to Nobel Prize-winning protein analysis. A Pew Research Center survey from February found 23% of U.S.

adults have used Open AI’s ChatGPT for work, for entertainment or to learn something new. After months of poking and prodding the technology, my favorite use is tackling the mundane and repetitive mental tasks people richer than me have long outsourced to other humans. I enjoy cooking and am reasonably good at it.

But I hate figuring out what to cook. Browsing through premium cooking apps to find the perfect recipe takes time and money. Googling is only useful if you know what you want.