A 350° oven will not cook a bell pepper in 30 minutes.
Nevertheless, I did as instructed by the Stuffed Peppers recipe in 99 South Philly’s Palizzi Club Culinary Secrets: Recipes from the Heart of Philadelphia, an ostensibly Italian cookbook self-published by the Lime Lounge in 2023. I packed the peppers with a wet mix of cooked white rice, canned diced tomatoes, chopped onions, garlic, herbs, corn, and shredded cheddar that made my hands look like they’d just disemboweled a pinata full of Old El Paso. I slid them in the oven and called out, “Siri, set timer for 30 minutes.”
“Thirty minutes and counting,” answered Siri, which, for many of us, represents the first integration of artificial intelligence into our everyday lives. In 2011, Siri walked so in 2025, generative AI could dupe my cookbook.
Last September, Joey Baldino, chef-owner of Palizzi Social Club and my coauthor on the restaurant’s cookbook, Dinner at the Club: 100 Years of Stories and Recipes from South Philly’s Palizzi Social Club, alerted me to the knockoff in a text-panic: “What is the protocol when somebody is ripping off your cookbook and selling it for themselves?”
Joey sent screenshots of the chaotic table of contents, which included recipes for fried chicken, margherita pizza, pizza margherita, margherita flatbread, and—of all things—jambalaya. There was also an unhinged Italian hoagie recipe, consisting of pepperoni, shredded mozzarella, raw garlic, mushrooms, and black olives. Most upsetting to Joey was the introduction, which asserted, “Each recipe in this book has been recreated exactly as it has been served at the Palizzi Club for generations.”
“Really sick about these recipes,” Joey texted, along with the Amazon link. “I didn’t study all my life and work nonstop just to get ripped off by some absolute shit fake bullshit.”
If ChatGPT were to create a restaurant, it would be called “Harvest & Hearth.” And it would serve food that “draws on inspiration from diverse culinary traditions.”
For creatives navigating the metastasizing miasma of AI-generated content, “shit fake bullshit” has become part of the business. “The future promised by AI is written with stolen words,” journalist Alex Reisner wrote in a 2023 The Atlantic expose on Meta’s use of 170,000 copyrighted books to train its open-source AI. Dinner at the Club and four of my other books come up on LibGen, a dataset for pirated works, when searching for my last name, as well as Preparation and Diels-Alder Reactions of 2,5-dihydrofuran in the Journal of the American Chemical Society by a scientist named Neal O. Erace.
