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... 🧵
Here's the book: "The Complete Crockpot Cookbook for Beginners" for 2024 (gotta keep up with crockpot innovations) by Luisa Florence.
All looks good — except for 2,000 days, which seems kinda arbitrary and a few to many for one year. But no big deal.
But then you open the book and it doesn't seem like it's... written by a human.
"What is Crock pot?" it asks.
"This electrical cooking equipment is used to make meals, particularly when you want to leave your cooking uncontrolled for hours."
Sadly, I always cook uncontrolled.
It has a brief history of the crockpot in stilted English:
"In the 1940s, when women were required to work in locations that were further away from their homes, it was the first time it was used in the United States..."
Very eusphemistic way of describing WWII, but okay...
"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 can successfully complete the food preparation."
Why finish cooking, when you can "successfully complete the food preparation" instead?
This got me to wondering about the author, "Luisa Florence." I looked her up and, lo and behold, there is hardly a trace of her outside Amazon.
Here's her photo. Looks like an AI-generated GAN image to me — note the divergent earrings, weird background, & missing left shoulder.
Her bio is also a tad...suspicous? She is 60 (eternally?) and lives in Philly.
"Her origins are Italians, she left Tuscany when she was only 12 years old because of her parents’ jobs."
So she's from Tuscany and her surname is the Tuscany regional capital? A tad on the nose...
So how is the cookbook itself? Hard to believe, but it has great reviews!
Granted, many of them look like someone asked ChatGPT to make multiple versions of the same review: working professional, new crockpot, health food for family, great beef recipe, blah blah blah...
Actually, most of Signora Florence's cookbooks get good reviews. Except for one: her anti-inflammatory cookbook.
People are pointing out typos, a chickpea and quinoa recipe that doesn't list chickpeas and quinoa in the ingredients.
Someone even says it looks like AI writing!
In any case, I'm looking forward to trying some AI-generated recipes.
And lest you think this is a unique situation, it is not.
Welcome to the future! kcrw.com/culture/shows/…
P.S. Signora Florence, if you're out there and not the hallucination of an LLM, I'm really sorry for suggesting you're an AI, but you aren't doing a great job of sounding human. 🙏
/END
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.