Introducing Chopped

This is our first post. It's hard to write, because Chopped will make some folks mad at us. But ignoring the truth doesn't change it. And the truth is that AI is here to stay, whether any of us like it or not.

Everyone agrees that slop in all forms is, and always has been, a drag. People use slop to describe all AI outputs, including good ones. But digital food suffers from a special kind of slop that existed before AI: the “best” sites are paywalled. The next-best require a would-be cook to scroll and scroll.

As much as we'd like to fund dying publishing empires, or pause to learn about a stranger's historical family food traditions, we're just trying to get through this moment: to cook a recipe we're missing two ingredients for in the forty-eight-minute window between school pickup and soccer, while a toddler upstairs screams because he pooped his pants (again).

Somehow, in 2026, that's still how online food works. Food sites should make our lives easier and more efficient. They should make food more accessible, not less. They should be functional and usable. Despite two decades of opportunity, most of them fail. That's why we created Chopped.

Chopped recipes are 100% generated by AI: The images, the ingredient lists, the cooking steps... everything.

Doing things this way lowers the cost to publish each recipe enough to get rid of the most interruptive ad formats and search engine chaff (sorry, “heartfelt prose Google no longer reads”) found on other recipe blogs. Chopped recipes are not human output. But they're not AI slop, either. Underlying the AI is a process created and maintained by people.

The prompts are as detailed as we can make them. They inform AI that vegans don't eat honey, and that a sauce can make a dish non-keto, even when the rest of the ingredients are keto. They map differences in Kosher for Passover between Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions. They describe what is, and is not, Halal.

When AI is done generating, human editors review the outputs. If a recipe comes out broken, they can improve, delete, or regenerate it in less than a minute. Our hybrid human/AI approach facilitates publishing no human team could possibly achieve in cost-comparable way.

It's also a sane use of AI. Can your phone use AI to generate a recipe? Sure. So can a thousand other phones, tonight, each conjuring the same-ish chicken piccata from scratch, with a fresh round of energy-and-water-hungry inference for every single ask.

We think our way is better. We hope you will too.