MyFitnessPal, the popular free food journaling app, is starting to use artificial intelligence, specifically allowing AI to plan your meals for you. Following the acquisition of a startup called Intent, MyFitnessPal is adding an AI-powered meal planning feature for subscribers.
The updated MyFitnessPal app will be able to create meal plans based on subscribers’ “goals, preferences, eating habits, and regimen,” according to MyFitnessPal, using information the app already has about you and what looks like a survey. This feature will also be part of the end-to-end experience. Any plan created by the app can be automatically converted into a grocery list for your next trip to the store or order to a grocery delivery service if you want to do as little shopping as possible.
Given the huge number of recipe and diet videos you can come across on social media, trying to simplify the process of planning what you’re going to eat makes sense. However, using artificial intelligence to do so can have some unintended consequences. Knowing the ability of AI to hallucinate, even if MyFitnessPal doesn’t generate recipes from scratch, it still seems like you might end up with strange food combinations or incorrect grocery lists.
The only way to find out for sure is to try the AI meal planner for yourself, and if you’re interested, you can already sign up for a waiting list to try it out as soon as it becomes available. MyFitnessPal reports that the meal planner will officially launch in the spring in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and to use it, you’ll need to join a new $99.99 annual subscription tier called Premium+.
