How I Discovered Philly’s Most Successful Cookbook Author Is AI

Longform

It’s Tuesday afternoon, close to the start of service, and I’m texting with Joe Cicala, chef of Cicala at the Divine Lorraine and someone who has been around the Italian food scene in Philly for more than a decade. I tell him I have a weird question. I tell him it’s totally okay if he says no — that he will probably say no — but that I have to ask. Because Joe is a good guy, he answers almost immediately.

Tuesday, 3:28 p.m.
Jason: I’m trying to track down a cook who may (or, more likely, may not) have worked at one of your restaurants. Would’ve likely been years ago. Her name is Luisa Florence. Ring any bells?

Like 5 minutes later
Joe: Hey! Just asked Angela if she rang any bells and we couldn’t remember anyone by that name. I also checked my contacts and emails and nothing came up. Sorry about that.

Jason: No worries at all. I’m just checking everywhere I can think of. Thanks for helping out.

Joe: Anytime.

Joe isn’t the first person I’ve reached out to about this. He isn’t the 10th. I’ve been doing this for a couple days now — phone calls, emails, text messages, to chefs I know, managers, PR people I’ve asked to run down their client lists. I’ve asked all of them the same thing: if they’ve ever heard of a woman or known anyone who might have heard of a woman who matches a series of very specific criteria.

• A cook, not a chef
• Local
• Likely employed anywhere from the early ’90s to the mid-2010s
• Absolutely in an Italian (or Italian-leaning) restaurant
• Named Luisa Florence

And so far, nothing. Nothing good, anyhow. Nothing solid. But that’s okay. I’m going to keep looking. Because there are a lot of restaurants in this city, and I can’t check them all, but I can check a lot of them. And I want to be sure of one thing before I go any further.

I want to be sure that Luisa Florence isn’t real.

This Is How It Started …

I saw this thread on Twitter.

And I know — I know — that’s the stupidest way ever to start a story, but truth is important here, and that’s the truth. I was burning time on Twitter when I should’ve been doing something more productive, and I saw this thread that started:

This week, my wife and I are celebrating our anniversary. My parents ordered us a very practical, thoughtful gift on Amazon: a crockpot and a crockpot cookbook. We’re thrilled. There’s just one minor issue: I’m pretty sure the cookbook was written by an AI. …

What followed was a brief dozen-tweet exploration by Matthew Kupfer, an investigative journalist for Voice of America News. Kupfer mostly writes about Russia and the Kremlin, organized crime, corruption — heavy, serious stuff. He’s written for the Moscow Times and the Kyiv Post and the San Francisco Standard, so this, too, is a guy who probably had more important things to be doing. But instead, he, too, was on Twitter, writing about crockpots and cookbooks and the possibility (near-certainty, actually) that the one he’d gotten as an anniversary gift — The Complete Crockpot Cookbook for Beginners, 2024 edition, written by Luisa Florence — was not, in fact, written by a person at all.

You probably know this story. It was the Thing of the Day on social media a while back. News outlets of varying respectability wrote hip-shot recaps and think pieces on the day-after or the day after that. And, weirdly, Kupfer’s tweet would even end up moving the ponderous levers of capitalism ever so slightly — but all that happens later, and we’ll get to it in due course.

Point is, it was a thing. Not a huge thing, but a thing. Kupfer’s thread got about 14,000 likes and 2,800 retweets and was seen by nearly 3.5 million people. And then, like 99.9 percent of everything that happens on the internet, Kupfer’s story just kind of faded into the cultural background radiation. Sank beneath the waves of virality, subsumed by the next day’s oddity or outrage. Everyone moved on.

Except me.

About the Author

Luisa Florence and her cookbook … allegedly / Images via Amazon

It wasn’t really the idea of an AI cookbook that hooked me when I read Kupfer’s tweets. I got hung up on the author — on the little details of Luisa Florence’s (alleged) life that crawled into my brain and just sat there, itching at me.

See, like most authors (probably all authors), Luisa had a bio. The story of her life, condensed down to fit on the back fold of a hardcover dust jacket or at the top of an Amazon page. There was a photo of her looking … I don’t know. Author-y, I guess? With her bangs and her reading glasses and her slightly out-of-focus pink scarf. But the words painted a better picture.

About the Author
Luisa Florence is 60 and lives in Philadelphia. She’s the author of various recipe books, some of which are best sellers.

Her origins are Italians, she left Tuscany when she was only 12 years old because of her parents’ jobs. Together with her mum, Luisa has learnt to love the kitchen, and within the years she developed extraordinary skills within preserves.

In her pantry, there is never a shortage of products as she says “you always have to be ready to welcome a group of friends for dinner”.

Her passion took her to work in different restaurants, acquiring even more experience.

Through the years she specialised in different cooking techniques even thanks to new technologies. Air Fryer and Ninja Foodi, Crock Pot, are perfect examples of help to prepare fast dishes, but nevertheless tasty and original. In this way, Luisa can manage her time, between home and work.

Luisa also has a great artistic sense, and her charcuterie recipes look like board masterpieces. Even the ice creams in her Ninja Creami cookbook are original, delicious and creative.

Her dream is to dedicate herself completely to the kitchen.

Her books are her way to share with a large audience all her secrets that she has learnt in all these years at the stove.

Now, if you like words the way that I like words, you know there’s a lot to love there. There’s so much about it that’s delightfully wrong or charmingly clumsy. There are mistakes in grammar and punctuation, sentences lacking a basic understanding of how words go together, a strange British accent in mum and learnt and specialised, and a kind of weird counter-personal chewiness to the language that just feels … alien. Like frantic love poetry run through a bad translation algorithm. Like how it sounds when your grandfather tries to use slang. I adore “Her origins are Italians” and her “extraordinary skills within preserves” and the phrase “nevertheless tasty and original” which I now say 10 times a day, like some kind of infectious verbal tic. But really, it was the very first sentence that caught my attention.

Luisa Florence is 60 and lives in Philadelphia.

Forever 60. Eternally 60. A perpetual grandmother, with her tasteful earrings and crepe-paper wrinkles, just sitting there, dreaming of the Piazzale Michelangelo and crockpot minestrone soup. I read that and thought to myself, If she was 60 when she published this book, she’s probably still alive. If she was ever really alive.

And if she lived in Philadelphia?

That meant I could find her.

A Conversation With Myself

Me: But she’s not real, though.

Also Me: But she might be.

Me: But she’s not.

Also Me: But she might be.

Me: Look, everyone agrees that she’s made up. EVERYONE. There’s nothing human about her. The writing is like an eighth-grader trying to talk their way into Harvard. The picture is what you’d get if you typed “My Best Friend’s Grandma” into a generative AI program. You know you can buy artificially generated author photos? You can buy entire fake authors. In bulk. It happens all the time now.

Also Me: Sure, but tell me: Is Luisa Florence more or less real than some celebrity chef you’re never going to meet? Someone who puts out a ghostwritten cookbook they never lay a finger on? Is she more or less real than Escoffier? You didn’t know him. He’s been dead for almost a hundred years, so you’re never going to know him. All you’ve ever seen of him is pictures and his recipes in Le Guide Culinaire. But you talk about that guy all the time.

Me: You’re an idiot. She’s not real.

Also Me: Yeah, but she might be.

Looking for Luisa

When I call people and ask them about Luisa, a lot of them say they don’t know her personally, but that yeah, maybe, they might’ve heard the name before.

Someone says, “She didn’t work for me, but yeah. I know the name. I think she worked at the place that used to be where Louie Louie is now.”

Penne. That place was called Penne. Luisa didn’t work there.

Someone asks about Ralph’s. No one at Ralph’s knew her. Someone else asks about Saloon. I can’t get anyone at Saloon to answer.

“Vetri,” someone else says. “She worked at Vetri, didn’t she?”

No, she didn’t.

One of my friends in PR asks Joey Baldino, because Joey has been around a while and has worked for everyone, but Joey says no. Never heard of her. Another friend trolls South Philly line crews for me, asking around, but gets nothing useful out of them, which might be because it’s South Philly and even if Luisa was literally standing right there next to the phone when the sous at Sal’s Red Gravy Heaven picked up, he wouldn’t cop to knowing her. No one would. But it might also be that I just haven’t asked in the right places yet.

I get one kitchen manager on the phone, and he says this is “the stupidest fucking question” he’s ever been asked, and I’m like, Come on … really? This is Philadelphia, asshole, and if THIS is the stupidest question anyone has ever asked you, then you gotta get out more. I mean, two days ago, one of my neighbors asked me if I thought a cat could survive jumping out of the second-floor window of her townhouse and I said yeah, sure, cats are amazing, and then she said, “But what if it was carrying a whole chicken?,” and that wasn’t even the stupidest question I’d heard THAT DAY.

But anyway, I keep calling, and I keep checking. I stare at the picture of her on my laptop, and it’s clear that the ears are lopsided, the earrings mismatched. Oh, and one of her shoulders appears to be missing, but not in a way that you notice right away. You kinda gotta look for it. And I do, because this is Luisa, right? No matter what comes of all these texts and calls and emails, this is her. Maybe the only version of her there is. Maybe just one of a billion-billion instants frozen from out of 60 years of life in Tuscany and Philly, in restaurant kitchens and her mother’s kitchen and her own kitchen. Sixty years of long shifts and bad bosses, growing old in an industry that doesn’t take well to age.

It’s her. The author photo of her shows all the hallmarks of an AI-generated picture — the shallow focus, the botched details, a kind of uncanny deadness around the eyes that I don’t think there’s a word for yet. This sense of something not-real pretending at life. But it’s Luisa.

If a machine made this, then this is the extent of her: one photo, a terrible bio, a dozen cheaply printed cookbooks churned out in rapid succession that will sit now on shelves in other people’s kitchens and be forgotten. They’ll never be beloved. No one will look back, 20 years from now, and ask where Mom got that recipe for air-fryer mozzarella sticks or crockpot chocolate peanut butter cake.

People buy cookbooks for two reasons: aspiration and utility. Aspirational cookbooks are the ones with the slick, glossy pages that make your fingertips feel slippery when you touch them. They’ve got beautiful photography, complicated recipes, words of wisdom from the chef (or the ghostwriter) about life, cooking, the view of the world from the lofty, celebrated heights they occupy. These are totems, bought by home cooks in the vain hope that some little bit of the celebrity chef’s talent will be absorbed just by flipping through the pages. You buy one of these books, and maybe you try to make one recipe — one half-assed attempt at Nobuyuki Matsuhisa’s octopus tiradito or re-creating Matty Matheson’s Double Beef Patty Melt with Gruyère and Molasses Bread where you have to use two English-muffin bottoms instead of the molasses bread because who has time to make their own goddamn molasses bread when they’re still trying to figure out how to deglaze a pan with fucking maple syrup, Matty — but really, you just stick it on a shelf in your kitchen and it sits there, like some kind of religious icon to be prayed to when the sauce breaks or the béchamel burns. The Saint of Lowered Expectations.

Utilitarian cookbooks are the opposite. These are the dog-eared, sauce-stained workhorses of the home kitchen. They’re not pretty (generally), but they exist to teach you how to do a thing as quickly and simply as possible. How to make chili. How to bake a chicken. Utilitarian cookbooks are what Luisa Florence writes. Her books were (are) an attempt at teaching people how to use their crockpots, get the most out of their Ninja Foodi air fryers, can their own vegetables. And some of those books really are best-sellers on Amazon. On the day I was looking, one of Luisa’s slow-cooker books was number one in the Black & African American Cooking category and number six in Hungarian Cooking, Food & Wine, concurrently. And those are two audiences that don’t traditionally see a lot of overlap. The shared portion of their Venn diagram is very small. So really, Luisa was bringing people together. And that would all be great, except for one thing.

Her books are really, really bad.

What Is Crock Pot

The 2023 edition of the Ultimate Crockpot Cookbook claims to contain 1,001 recipes, but really, there are 424.

There’s a recipe for bacon baked potatoes that, when followed, results in a kind of potato soup. There’s a recipe for “Collard Green Feet Saute” that, thankfully, includes no feet. There are plenty of simple, straightforward recipes that would absolutely work just fine, but there are also ones that tell you to just throw a slice of deli ham and a slice of cheddar on top of raw chicken breasts swimming in vegetable stock, turn on your crockpot, and then, six hours later, presto! Chicken cordon bleu. Like magic.

Every page in Luisa’s cookbook has four recipes, and there’s a stretch during the chapter on pork dishes where every single list of cooking directions is just some variation on Put everything in the crockpot, turn on the crockpot, cook in the crockpot for X hours, serve warm. With the exception of a recipe for marsala pork chops that includes one additional step, this goes on for 11 pages.

There’s a whole section on drinks that you can make in a crockpot, and one of them is one cup of whiskey, one cup of ginger ale, pumpkin puree, water, maple syrup, and a cinnamon stick. For the record, that’s eight shots of whiskey. Plus a half-cup of pumpkin. And I don’t know what kind of Halloween-obsessed alcoholics Luisa knows, but that recipe alone could operate as a kind of reverse Turing Test — no actual human being would ever include a recipe like that in a cookbook meant for other humans.

Simply titled “What Is Crock Pot,” Luisa’s introduction to crockpot cookery is my favorite part of the book. In it, she explains (several times) what a crockpot is made of, how electricity works, how a crockpot uses electricity to cook things very slowly, what a crockpot is made of (again), how glass works, how a crockpot is not a pressure cooker, and, finally, the complex socio-economic pressures felt by American women in the 1940s who, when moving into the workforce for the first time due to the industrial manpower shortages caused by overseas deployments during the second World War, were suddenly required to balance full-time careers, childcare and homemaking all at the same time. Luisa sums it up in one sentence:

“At that time, women were required to prepare dinner in the morning before they left for work so that when they returned in the evening, they could successfully complete the food preparation.”

And then she explains what a crockpot is made of again.

If Kindles and audiobooks have drained some of the weight from books — removing them from the world as physical objects and turning them into pure data — then large language models, machine learning and generative AI have made actual books as delicate as moth’s wings. Want to write a book? You hardly have to do anything at all. Just feed a few ideas into a computer program raised on a diet of a million other books scraped and gobbled up from the internet, and it’ll spit out a finished manuscript that has all the characteristics of a book without actually being a book, because no one will have actually written it. It will just happen. There’ll be a bunch of words, arranged into sentences, paragraphs, chapters. It will, to the best of the artificial intelligence’s ability, be about what you wanted it to be about — cowboys or monsters or aerobics or hedge-fund management. It will read like the best version of a cowboys and monsters hedge-fund aerobics book that the program can cobble together and be structured in a way that the AI’s machine-learning program has been trained to see as successful in a certain percentage of other books within its model.

Some of the many cookbooks available on Amazon that feel uncannily similar to Florence’s / Images via Amazon

And sure, it’s a little more complicated than that, but it’s not a lot more complicated than that. During the course of my search for Luisa, I reached out to an AI expert for a little perspective — some definition of who (or what, or why) Luisa actually is. Brian Sathianathan is the co-founder of Iterate.ai, an enterprise AI applications platform — which means he’s a friend of the robots, one of the people very much on the side of the Luisa Florences of the world — but he’s been in the game a long time. Dude worked on the first iPhone for Apple. He’s got patents. He’s seen the rise of this from the floor up.

“While AI-assisted books and LLM-generated content are undoubtedly changing the publishing landscape, I firmly believe that human authors still have a marketable and profitable future,” Sathianathan told me, “because AI-generated content, no matter how advanced, cannot replicate the emotional depth, nuance and authenticity that human authors bring to the table.”

He explained that the thing that differentiates — and will always differentiate — human-written books from the libraries of the machines is a connection to the human experience, something that no LLM will ever understand. “By sharing their personal stories, experiences and perspectives, authors can establish a unique voice and perspective that readers can’t find elsewhere.”

And that sounds great on paper. That’s precisely what the new gods of artificial intelligence want us all to believe. And it might — might — actually be true. But in order to be an author, one must first be an authority in something. The job title is right there in the word, and that’s basically the only qualification. You have to know something (about cowboys, aerobics, crockpots, whatever), and you have to know enough of something to fill a book.

So by that logic, an AI is actually the ideal author. Because who is more of an authority on something than the system that has digested an entire internet’s worth of information on any given topic?

“I believe in the idea that change is constant and we are meant to evolve,” Sathianathan explained. “Instead of fearing the rise of AI, we should be excited to explore its possibilities and see how it can enhance our lives. AI is a tool, just like the wheel, the internet, or any other innovation that has helped us progress. It’s not here to destroy what we’ve built, but to help us create something new and better.”

And I would argue that sautéed feet and a house full of party guests ripped on pumpkin whiskey are not the hallmarks of a new or better world, but sometimes that’s just the price you pay. There’s an idiot-savant quality to artificial intelligences at the moment. They know everything but have difficulty explaining it to people. They can fill a book, easy, but they stumble over the individual words. They bumble, they digress, they live. They’re not great at being authors yet, but they’re getting better every minute of every day. And all they do is practice.

Sathianathan insisted there is a middle ground, a hybrid model where human authors can harness the blinding powers of ravenous large-language models and trained generative programs to create things that we can’t yet even imagine: “As Nikola Tesla said, ‘The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.’” And that, if I’m being honest, is some of the creepiest shit I’ve ever heard. If I was making a movie, that would be the final line in the opening montage, spoken by the robot messiah right before its soulless legions marched off to conquer the world.

Customer Service

One day, Luisa is just … gone.

I was making my calls, my emails, went searching for the title of one of her air-fryer books, and I see that all of her books except one (Canning and Preserving for Beginners, published in 2020) are missing from Amazon. Her author page has been pulled down. Every place that once sold her books now has them listed as unavailable, out of stock. I look, and the only thing I can find is a physical copy of one of her crockpot books available on Ebay.

I buy it immediately.

I reach out to Amazon. I’m not expecting any kind of answer (because it’s Amazon), but someone gets back to me in minutes, schedules a call for later that afternoon, says they’ll only talk on background but might be able to get me an official statement, depending on what, exactly, I want to ask about.

I want to talk about Luisa. I want to know what happened to her, but Amazon can’t tell me. Not officially. Amazon can’t tell me why her books have been pulled, only that they have been. Only that Amazon is aware of the Matthew Kupfer tweets and the Luisa Florence situation and is very concerned with the proliferation of AI-generated content (read: books by robots) and very concerned about customer satisfaction. So I ask if there’s some kind of official policy regarding the use of AI, and I’m told that yes, there is. As of last year, in order to put a cap on the number of AI-assisted books being published via Kindle Direct Publishing — Amazon’s digital self-publishing platform — authors using Amazon’s service are no longer allowed to publish more than three different books in a single day.

Three books.

A day.

And that’s ridiculous, right? I mean, that’s not a limit; it’s just an acceptance of a problem you have no interest in solving. And the Amazon representative and I laugh about this for a few minutes — about how awful it sounds when you actually say it out loud — but later, after the call is done and I’m thinking about it, the nickel finally drops. Artificially capping the number of books that any one publishing account can upload per day at three isn’t a way to keep human authors competitive or limit the use of artificial intelligence and LLMs on the platform. Amazon knows that battle has already been lost. The limit is only there to keep the robots from publishing three hundred a day, which is one of those things that are so grim that you have to laugh just to keep from crying.

(Later, Sathianathan would explain to me that this sort of low-quality work, dumped by the ton onto self-publishing platforms, has a name: “[It’s] called ‘Content Spam.’ The problem is that AI-generated content is often created using templates and formulas, which can easily be replicated and scaled. This means that it can generate a large volume of content quickly and cheaply. But there are a few reasons why content spam is unlikely to become a major issue: algorithmic fatigue, lack of creativity, and readers’ skepticism of its quality and authenticity.”)

By the end of the next day, Ashley Vanicek, Amazon’s spokesperson, gets me the company’s official statement. It reads like this:

We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience, and we are constantly evaluating developments that impact that experience, which includes the rapid evolution and expansion of generative AI tools.

We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have a robust set of methods that help us proactively detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not. We also remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines, including content that creates a poor customer experience. When patterns of abuse warrant it, we suspend publisher accounts to prevent repeated abuse.

Our process and guidelines will keep evolving as we see changes in AI-driven publishing to make sure we provide the best possible experience for customers.

Nowhere in a book’s description on Amazon does it have to say whether it was written using AI. Publishers are required to give that information to Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing, but it’s only used internally. The customer never sees it.

The volume limits on new works published were put in place purely to protect customers. For Amazon, it’s a quality-control issue, not an artistic one. No one wants to tell the robots they’re bad at what they’re doing, and Amazon can’t possibly police every book on its platform. The company just wants to make sure the books aren’t so bad that people start to complain.

Finally, Amazon confirms that the specific content I’m concerned about — Luisa’s books — is no longer available anywhere on Amazon (and even in the wild, among resellers, they’re rare). Luisa has been disappeared. She’s gone. And I’m a little bit sad, actually. I miss her almost as soon as I get the news. But after all this, you have to ask yourself what gone even means under these circumstances.

What does it mean to vanish when you never really existed in the first place?

Epilogue: Somewhere in Italy

A few days after I give up my search for Luisa Florence, I find something.

On the Amazon listing page for her one remaining book — the canning book from 2020, which exists now solely as a fixed point in the digital landscape, not as a thing that you can actually buy — there’s a publisher listed: Zoe Publishing Ltd.

I’d looked for Zoe Publishing earlier. Ever the hoarder of unremarkable things, I still have a yellow Post-it note on my desk with that name scribbled on it, with a question mark and some other queries I had for Vanicek, the Amazon spokesperson.

Here’s the thing, though. I didn’t ask her. I forgot. And while I’m sure I’d googled the name (once again trusting the artificial intelligence that commands search algorithms), I’m also sure I didn’t find anything. I would have told you if I had.

Now, though, I punch the name in, and I get a UK.gov website that appears to be some sort of massive repository of information on every business legally operating within the United Kingdom. It’s a cold, sterile, towering example of bureaucratic brutalism — massive, ruthlessly organized, cross-referenced and efficient. And Zoe Publishing Ltd is listed among its files.

Zoe Publishing Ltd is — or was — a private limited company, incorporated on the 21st of July, 2020 (just a couple months before Luisa’s first books were released), then dissolved on December 19th, 2023. It’s listed as primarily being concerned with the publishing and retail sale of books, both through mail order and over the internet, and it has an office address listed on Great West Road in Brentford, U.K. The company has zero employees, no outstanding debt or properties, and just one officer: Luigi Sorgia, born September 1972, in Italy.

Yeah, his origins are Italians.

Online, I can’t find the company, only the shrapnel of its dissolution. A few books on day-trading, online schooling, slow-cooker keto recipes, canning and preserving. The occasional publication date (always within the brief window of Zoe Publishing’s existence). On Amazon, there are some publishers with similar names (Zion Zoe Publications, Zoe Shakh Press, Zoe Rosie Publication), but Luigi Sorgia is attached to none of them that I can find. He had just the one company, and now not even that.

But he is a person. An actual, physical human. And he either invented Luisa, or he knew her, once upon a time. He may be the only one who really knows who — or what — she is.

So maybe I’m not ready to give up my search for Luisa Florence just yet.

Published as “Looking for Luisa” in the July 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.