How I Discovered Phillys Most Successful Cookbook Author Doesnt Actually Exist – Philadelphia magazine
Longform
Luisa Florence was a best-selling cookbook author on Amazon ... right up until she wasnt.
Illustration by Till Lauer
Its Tuesday afternoon, close to the start of service, and Im 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 its 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:Im trying to track down a cook who may (or, more likely, may not) have worked at one of your restaurants. Wouldve 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 couldnt remember anyone by that name. I also checked my contacts and emails and nothing came up. Sorry about that.
Jason: No worries at all. Im just checking everywhere I can think of. Thanks for helping out.
Joe: Anytime.
Joe isnt the first person Ive reached out to about this. He isnt the 10th. Ive been doing this for a couple days now phone calls, emails, text messages, to chefs I know, managers, PR people Ive asked to run down their client lists. Ive asked all of them the same thing: if theyve ever heard of a woman or known anyone who might have heard of a woman who matches a series of very specific criteria.
And so far, nothing. Nothing good, anyhow. Nothing solid. But thats okay. Im going to keep looking. Because there are a lot of restaurants in this city, and I cant 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 isnt real.
I saw this thread on Twitter.
And I know I know thats the stupidest way ever to start a story, but truth is important here, and thats the truth. I was burning time on Twitter when I shouldve 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. Were thrilled. Theres just one minor issue: Im 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. Hes 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 hed 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, Kupfers tweet would even end up moving the ponderous levers of capitalism ever so slightly but all that happens later, and well get to it in due course.
Point is, it was a thing. Not a huge thing, but a thing. Kupfers 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, Kupfers story just kind of faded into the cultural background radiation. Sank beneath the waves of virality, subsumed by the next days oddity or outrage. Everyone moved on.
Except me.
Luisa Florence and her cookbook allegedly / Images via Amazon
It wasnt really the idea of an AI cookbook that hooked me when I read Kupfers tweets. I got hung up on the author on the little details of Luisa Florences (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 dont 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. Shes 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 theres a lot to love there. Theres so much about it thats 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, shes probably still alive. If she was ever really alive.
And if she lived in Philadelphia?
That meant I could find her.
Me: But shes not real, though.
Also Me: But she might be.
Me: But shes not.
Also Me: But she might be.
Me: Look, everyone agrees that shes made up. EVERYONE. Theres nothing human about her. The writing is like an eighth-grader trying to talk their way into Harvard. The picture is what youd get if you typed My Best Friends 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 youre 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 didnt know him. Hes been dead for almost a hundred years, so youre never going to know him. All youve ever seen of him is pictures and his recipes in Le Guide Culinaire. But you talk about that guy all the time.
Me: Youre an idiot. Shes not real.
Also Me: Yeah, but she might be.
When I call people and ask them about Luisa, a lot of them say they dont know her personally, but that yeah, maybe, they mightve heard the name before.
Someone says, She didnt 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 didnt work there.
Someone asks about Ralphs. No one at Ralphs knew her. Someone else asks about Saloon. I cant get anyone at Saloon to answer.
Vetri, someone else says. She worked at Vetri, didnt she?
No, she didnt.
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 its South Philly and even if Luisa was literally standing right there next to the phone when the sous at Sals Red Gravy Heaven picked up, he wouldnt cop to knowing her. No one would. But it might also be that I just havent asked in the right places yet.
I get one kitchen manager on the phone, and he says this is the stupidest fucking question hes ever been asked, and Im 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 wasnt even the stupidest question Id heard THAT DAY.
But anyway, I keep calling, and I keep checking. I stare at the picture of her on my laptop, and its 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 mothers kitchen and her own kitchen. Sixty years of long shifts and bad bosses, growing old in an industry that doesnt take well to age.
Its 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 dont think theres a word for yet. This sense of something not-real pretending at life. But its 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 peoples kitchens and be forgotten. Theyll 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. Theyve 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 chefs 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 Matsuhisas octopus tiradito or re-creating Matty Mathesons Double Beef Patty Melt with Gruyre 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 theyre 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 bchamel burns. The Saint of Lowered Expectations.
Utilitarian cookbooks are the opposite. These are the dog-eared, sauce-stained workhorses of the home kitchen. Theyre 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 Luisas 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 dont 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.
The 2023 edition of the Ultimate Crockpot Cookbook claims to contain 1,001 recipes, but really, there are 424.
Theres a recipe for bacon baked potatoes that, when followed, results in a kind of potato soup. Theres 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 Luisas cookbook has four recipes, and theres 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.
Theres 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, thats eight shots of whiskey. Plus a half-cup of pumpkin. And I dont 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, Luisas 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 moths 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 itll 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. Therell be a bunch of words, arranged into sentences, paragraphs, chapters. It will, to the best of the artificial intelligences 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 AIs 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 Florences / Images via Amazon
And sure, its a little more complicated than that, but its 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 hes a friend of the robots, one of the people very much on the side of the Luisa Florences of the world but hes been in the game a long time. Dude worked on the first iPhone for Apple. Hes got patents. Hes 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 cant find elsewhere.
And that sounds great on paper. Thats 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 thats 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 internets 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. Its not here to destroy what weve built, but to help us create something new and better.
And I would argue that sauted feet and a house full of party guests ripped on pumpkin whiskey are not the hallmarks of a new or better world, but sometimes thats just the price you pay. Theres 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. Theyre not great at being authors yet, but theyre 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 cant yet even imagine: As Nikola Tesla said, The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine. And that, if Im being honest, is some of the creepiest shit Ive 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.
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. Im not expecting any kind of answer (because its Amazon), but someone gets back to me in minutes, schedules a call for later that afternoon, says theyll 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 cant tell me. Not officially. Amazon cant 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 theres some kind of official policy regarding the use of AI, and Im 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 Amazons digital self-publishing platform authors using Amazons service are no longer allowed to publish more than three different books in a single day.
Three books.
A day.
And thats ridiculous, right? I mean, thats not a limit; its 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 Im thinking about it, the nickel finally drops. Artificially capping the number of books that any one publishing account can upload per day at three isnt 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: [Its] 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, Amazons spokesperson, gets me the companys 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 havecontent 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 books 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 its 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, its a quality-control issue, not an artistic one. No one wants to tell the robots theyre bad at what theyre doing, and Amazon cant possibly police every book on its platform. The company just wants to make sure the books arent so bad that people start to complain.
Finally, Amazon confirms that the specific content Im concerned about Luisas books is no longer available anywhere on Amazon (and even in the wild, among resellers, theyre rare). Luisa has been disappeared. Shes gone. And Im 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?
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 theres a publisher listed: Zoe Publishing Ltd.
Id 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.
Heres the thing, though. I didnt ask her. I forgot. And while Im sure Id googled the name (once again trusting the artificial intelligence that commands search algorithms), Im also sure I didnt 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. Its 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 Luisas first books were released), then dissolved on December 19th, 2023. Its 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 cant 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 Publishings 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 Im not ready to give up my search for Luisa Florence just yet.
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