AI Came Up With My Shopping List This Week — and Recommended Recipes

There are many, many reasons to be leery of AI, and its most notorious incarnation, ChatGPT. But until the robot uprising we're all sort of expecting, you can get ChatGPT to work for you. Here's how I asked ChatGPT to make my shopping list and some recipes for the week, and how it went.

If you haven't used ChatGPT, getting started is easy (AI wants to help, obviously). Just go to chat.openAI.com and create an account. For now, this is free, though you can sign up for the premium subscription version, Chat GPT Plus, which offers faster access for $20 a month. But as long as there's a free version, you might as well take advantage of it.

Create an account (you will need a phone number), and that's it. Once you're logged in, you'll see a bar at the bottom of your screen that says, "Send a message." Just type in your request. That's it. Now, making sure you're asking the right question can be tricky.

Luckily, ours was pretty simple: I wanted a grocery list and recipes, and I tossed in whatever parameters I could think of, including where I wanted to shop, a budget, healthy foods (and ingredients I didn't like) and how many people I needed to feed. I created two:

"Please come up with my weekly shopping list. I need to buy food for dinner for four people six nights this week and lunch for two people five days this week. I would like the recipes to be healthy. Please include recipes for all of these meals. My budget is $100."

"Please create a shopping list to use at Trader Joe's for under $200 for a week's worth of dinners for four people and lunches for two people and mostly healthy without any bell peppers and attach easy recipes using what I purchase

What did I get? Close but no cigar. Though I hoped it might suggest some of Trader Joe's private label products (like that Cheddar Jalapeño Pull-Apart Bread), but no dice. It also made recipe suggestions that seemed alright, but there wasn't a lot of nuance, like the amount of garlic powder in a recipe.

Because the AI is learning, you can't expect the best answers to your questions (yet). And if you don't love the responses, the AI won't get its feelings hurt. You can hit the button that says "Regenerate Response" above the bar at the bottom or go to the sidebar at the upper right part of the screen, where you can have the AI exemplify, shorten, or otherwise tweak its answer.

While I'm not sure if I want AI to make my shopping list going forward, it was a good start. Reading the recipes, I even decided to make one of the suggestions for dinner, which had the (almost impossible) distinction of being a hit with both kids (for the record, it was tuna, tomato, cucumber, and white beans with red onion instead of the recommended avocado). The husband wasn't sold, but I considered it as close to a home run as I could get. I still think AI is taking over (or at least taking our jobs), but in the meantime it's awfully handy.