A 350° oven is insufficient to cook a bell pepper in 30 minutes.
Regardless, I proceeded according to the instructions in the Stuffed Peppers recipe found in 99 South Philly’s Palizzi Club Culinary Secrets: Recipes from the Heart of Philadelphia, a seemingly Italian cookbook self-published by the Lime Lounge in 2023. I filled the peppers with a moist combination of cooked white rice, canned diced tomatoes, chopped onions, garlic, herbs, corn, and shredded cheddar that left my hands looking as though they had just torn apart a piñata filled with Old El Paso products. I placed them in the oven and instructed, “Siri, set timer for 30 minutes.”
“Thirty minutes and counting,” Siri responded, which signifies the initial integration of artificial intelligence into our daily routines for many of us. In 2011, Siri made strides so that by 2025, generative AI could replicate 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 through a frantic text: “What should you do when someone is plagiarizing your cookbook and profiting from it?”
Joey shared screenshots of a disorganized table of contents, which featured recipes for fried chicken, margherita pizza, pizza margherita, margherita flatbread, and oddly enough—jambalaya. There was also a bizarre Italian hoagie recipe made up of pepperoni, shredded mozzarella, raw garlic, mushrooms, and black olives. The most troubling for Joey was the introduction, which claimed, “Every recipe in this book has been re-created precisely as it has been served at the Palizzi Club for generations.”
“I’m really upset about these recipes,” Joey texted, along with the Amazon link. “I didn’t devote my entire life to studying and working tirelessly just to have some complete fraud steal from me.”
If ChatGPT were to establish a restaurant, it might be named “Harvest & Hearth.” The menu would feature dishes “inspired by a wide array of culinary traditions.”
For creatives grappling with the ever-expanding fog of AI-generated materials, “shit fake bullshit” has become a part of the industry. “The future promised by AI is composed of borrowed words,” journalist Alex Reisner commented in a 2023 The Atlantic article discussing Meta’s utilization of 170,000 copyrighted texts to train its open-source AI. Dinner at the Club along with four of my other publications appear on LibGen, a dataset for pirated content, when looking up my last name, as well as Preparation and Diels-Alder Reactions of 2,5-dihydrofuran in the Journal of the American Chemical Society authored by a scientist named Neal O. Erace.
