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.”
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.
If this is happening to Neal, what hope does a guy who writes about veal parm have?
Some, it turns out. While the legal system is still catching up to AI’s manifest destiny, there’s reason for optimism; in September, Anthropic settled a lawsuit for $1.5 billion, the first of its kind. As another one of my restaurant cookbooks, Laurel: Modern American Flavors in Philadelphia, was used to train Anthropic’s AI, I’m entitled to a claim of $3,000. According to details of the settlement, which would be split with my publisher, then split with my coauthor chef Nick Elmi, giving each of us a whopping $750. The check memo line should read, “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
Another small comfort is that much of the AI-generated content out there is hot slop, 99 South Philly’s Palizzi Club Culinary Secrets included. I know this because I ordered a copy for $11.88 from ThriftBooks.com. (Ingram Content Group, whose print-on-demand publishing arm, Lightning Source LLC, filled the ThriftBooks order, did not respond to emails for this story. Our publisher succeeded in getting the dupe removed from Amazon, but it persists on secondhand-seller websites.) On the cover, low-res ClipArt forms a border around the title text: a burning candle in a wine glass, strawberries growing on a basil plant, a mouse, madeleines, pasta that looks like a dreidel. “Unlock the secret to delicious home cooking,” reads the back cover, in a typeface better suited to “Unlock the secret to this cursed Egyptian tomb.”
I planned to test three overlapping recipes. In Dinner at the Club, we have the ricotta pie, a temperamental, ethereal cheesecake flavored with almonds, citrus, vanilla, and rum that gently bakes for two to two and a half hours. The recipe is from Joey’s mom, who passed away earlier this year. In 99, we have the Ricotta Cheesecake with a “crunchy biscuit base” that is mentioned in the headnote and never again. The recipe is from something that never breathed oxygen.
I scraped the sweet batter into a greased springform pan (greased with what? Whatever you like; the recipe doesn’t specify) and popped it in the oven (which rack? Whichever you like; the recipe doesn’t specify). After the recommended 40-minute bake, it was, as expected, still raw inside. I let it go another half hour, and a tester came out clean. The cake was brownish and measured an inch-and-quarter tall, making it easy to mistake for a Spanish tortilla.
“How is it?” my wife, Charlotte, asked, and I answered honestly: It didn’t taste horrible. It didn’t taste like anything, really, except the lemon curd I spread on top, as instructed. The texture was decent thanks to the extra cook time. “Why,” she asked, “didn’t you let the recipe not work?”
Inability to sublimate two decades of culinary instincts? Not wanting my name on a failed dish, even in the privacy of my own home? I just couldn’t help myself from proactively troubleshooting these demented recipes, like cooking the potatoes for 99’s gnocchi longer than the instructed 12 minutes. After shaping and cutting the dumplings, the recipe instructed me to bake them in the oven, cool and serve. That’s it. The recipe just ends; no sauce. So I went into salvage mode, sauteeing the spongy, underseasoned pierogi innards in brown butter, rosemary and Parm. Charlotte looked at me like I was a kidnapping victim helping to tighten his own ropes.
In August, just two days earlier at the Ai4 conference in Vegas, the “godfather of AI” Goeffrey Hinton said in his keynote address that building maternal instincts into advanced artificial intelligence might prevent it from dominating humanity. I realized I was doing that but vice versa, the way a parent might training-wheel their young cooks along. In other words, behaving like a human, with empathy and care.
My Siri timer chimed, signaling the peppers were “ready.” I opened the oven to find their bodies as hard and red as a boiled lobster. I could have let them cook another 45 minutes, the recommended bake time for the Dinner at the Club risotto-and-ragu-stuffed peppers. The AI-generated tragedies looked up at me, counting on that empathy and care, but daddy was all out.
Imagine the bossy, vegetal crunch of a nearly raw bell pepper. Imagine using it like a tortilla chip to scoop up a loose, lukewarm porridge studded with corn and undercooked onion. Imagine being a grown-ass adult and taking a bite of something so nasty, you spit it out in the sink. Imagine being happy about it. One day, AI might write all the cookbooks and subjugate humanity. Not today.