After my sage plant struggled for years in a shadowy corner of my roof-deck planter garden, I moved it into the sunniest spot up there. Boy did that make a difference. It also meant I needed to figure out what to do with all the leaves it produced. As luck would have it, I was also trying out AI cooking platforms.

That night, I plugged the prompt “recipe using brats and lots of sage” into an AI recipe generator and it gave me what it called “sage infused brats skillet with caramelized onions.” Ooh, that sounds nice, I thought.

The platform I prompted is called DishGen, one of the few services that specializes in AI cooking. It takes recipes from large language models like OpenAI and Anthropic and repackages them into more kitchen-friendly formats. It also gives users the ability to create meal plans. (Other tools, like ChefGPT and Epicure, offer similar features.)

DishGen's sage-and-sausage recipe used only 2 tablespoons of sage, not exactly lots, but I picked my way through the steps and emerged with a pleasant-enough Tuesday dinner. I also needed to use a fair amount of my own kitchen experience to get it across the finish line.

For example, the ingredients called for a “large yellow onion, thinly sliced.” Shall we peel it? Cut in half before we slice it? Pole-to-pole or through the equator? And how thin is thin? It didn't say. People who like cooking from well-written recipes would find this frustrating.

The recipe also calls for “2 tablespoons fresh sage leaves, chopped,” which comma lovers will appreciate, is confusing. Do you fold up those sage leaves and smash them into your tablespoon, then chop them? (It's clearer to call...