They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but when it comes to artificial intelligence and cookbooks, especially personal cookbooks filled with family stories, there is no room for imposters.
Joanne Lee Molinaro took home a James Beard award in 2022 for her blog-turned-cookbook, The Korean Vegan. A year later, she spotted a convincing knockoff on Amazon. Upon investigation, she determined that the plagiarist probably wasn't human, and in fact was a computer. Fortunately, Molinaro (who happens to be a lawyer by day) and her publishing company got the book removed from Amazon. But AI is developing at what Molinaro calls "a ridiculously rapid pace." What does that portend for authors in the cookbook space?
KCRW: How's it going? I'm so sorry you had to go through this.
Joanne Lee Molinaro: Yeah, it was a pretty stressful ten-day period. But in the end, it just proved that the human spirit conquers all.
How were you alerted to the imitation of your cookbook, The Korean Vegan?
Well, it wasn't so much [being alerted to] it, I noticed it. I was on Amazon because I regularly order copies of my own book to give away to people. We were on Amazon and we were ordering a bunch. Amazon is really good at telling you, "If you like that book, you might like this one." Not surprisingly, it offered this other Korean vegan cookbook that looked shockingly similar to mine. I filed it away at that time because it wasn't the first time that I'd seen knockoffs of my book. But a few days later, a very good friend of mine and another cookbook writer sent me a screenshot of it and basically said, "What the eff is this?"
What action did you end up taking? Did you report it? Did you look at it further? Did you buy it?
I did not buy it. I've made that mistake in the past. I have bought the knockoff versions of [my cookbook] and all it did was upset me even further. I think that's really the tricky part about this. Sure, there's the solution-oriented part. "How can I fix this?" But there's also the emotional part of it. You feel sort of helpless, you feel enraged, you feel almost violated. I felt all of those things.
I've learned in the past that there's not much I can do about this, so I'm not going to subject myself to needless torture. But in this situation, the knockoff was so egregious, I did take a look at the sample that you can look through on Amazon. I discovered that they not only copied my style and the name and the font and the colors, they also copied, word for word, my chapters, including the order of those chapters. That's when I got really angry.
I immediately contacted my publisher and asked them, "Hey, can you look at this?" They had looked at other knock offs in the past and had advised me that there wasn't much they could do. But in this situation, they copied my chapters, and I think that crosses a line. Ultimately, [my publisher] agreed and ultimately, Amazon agreed and removed the listing.
Molinaro came across a knockoff of her cookbook that mimicked her chapter listings and included recipes with meat. Photo courtesy of Avery.
What lived within those chapter headings that were knockoffs of your chapter headings?
Some people have said, "Well, chapters are chapters. Mains, entrees, desserts. What's the creativity in that? Who cares if people copy a boilerplate template for chapters?" But that's not what my chapters were. For example, I included a chapter called "Bbang," which is the Korean word for bread. It was a very random chapter in a Korean vegan cookbook. You don't typically see bread in a traditional Korean meal or a traditional Korean restaurant. I included that because I personally love bread, and I wanted to call it by the Korean name, bbang. I don't know that you'll find any Korean American books that have a chapter called "Bbang."
There are a lot of other chapters like banchan, which is the Korean word for side dishes. That's the best translation I could think of. That is just a treatment of what I consider to be the soul of Korean cuisine, which are those side dishes that you often see when you go to a Korean restaurant, all those beautiful pickled vegetables that come with your main course. There were parts of the chapters that reflected my personality, the thought that I put into the order of it, what went into each chapter. To see someone, or I should say something, so brazenly copy that, was incredibly hurtful to me, and very upsetting.
When Molinaro spotted a chapter called "Bbang" in the imitation cookbook, she knew something was amiss. In her original cookbook, she shares a recipe for paht bbang, red bean paste bread. Photo courtesy of Avery.
Who did the author of this imitation turn out to be?
Well, nobody really knows. The author purports to be a "Rachael Issy." I and many of my Instagram followers who are very, very loyal, Googled this name. They attempted to find some sort of digital footprint, which you would expect for an author who's partaking in the commercial library of Amazon, but there was none. There was nothing out there. Between that, which in this day and age is virtually impossible, as well as some of the grammatical errors, you can see one right on the title, the cover of the book, as well as the fact that, according to those who did download a copy for my sake, suggested that these recipes weren't entirely vegan. All of those things suggested that there might have been and likely was a fairly large AI footprint to this copycat.
Molinaro's Thanksgiving dessert staple is Pecan Paht, a sweet red bean pie that she finds less cloying than traditional pecan pies. Photo courtesy of Avery.
Is there some kind of Amazon sales situation that makes this easy for people to do?
That is a question for somebody else, because I will never investigate doing that for myself. I honestly don't know. From what I understand, having now heard from a number of people in my community who are more well versed in this, there are thriving and successful cottage industries that are devoted specifically to this practice: How can you churn out and produce, cheaply but very effectively, books that capitalize on the success of actual human authors?
My book has done relatively well. There are algorithms out there that can mine through all the different books on Amazon and identify for people, these are the hundred books that are doing really well this week. From there, people decide, "Let me use chat GPT to generate something that looks a lot like this otherwise successful book." I actually tested it for myself. I did a podcast episode on this whole ordeal. I went on to Chat GPT and I said, "Write me a chapter on Korean vegan main entrees." It busted it out in like five seconds. It was pretty remarkable.
How distressing. You've said that you have very little recourse, and that you were lucky in this instance that both your publisher and Amazon responded and they ended up taking it down. How do consumers avoid these kinds of imposters?
One thing that I noticed that happens a lot with these types of knockoffs is, number one, I noticed that a lot of these so-called "positive reviews," they sound eerily similar. They look like copycats of each other with maybe a couple of words or phrases switched out here and there. The other thing that I noticed was, wow, a lot of these reviews are uploaded on the exact same day, like 10, 20, 30 of them all on the same day. That's really strange. All of them appeared to have been uploaded before this book was even published. So there are all sorts of weird, glitchy things you can notice with just a little bit more attention.
The other thing that I love to do with these books is I often flip through the sample. Oftentimes, when you look through there, you'll be like, "Wait a second, this doesn't look like somebody really put a lot of attention into this book."
Now, here's the tricky thing about it. That's today. What is it going to be like in three months? What is it going to be like in a year? We have already seen evidence that AI is learning at this ridiculously rapid pace. At a certain point, these copycats are going to look so, so good. It will be much harder for consumers, like you and I, to figure out, what are the glitchy weird things that make me a little bit suspicious? That's what I would do today. But honestly, it's a little scary what tools we're going to have in a year.
Molinaro refers to her version of japchae as "basically a Korean warm pasta salad, with naturally gluten-free pasta." Photo courtesy of Avery.
Wow. It seems like you should just be able to follow the money, that Amazon should have some sort of way to follow who they're sending payments to. It makes me want to become a detective.
I hear you. It's all IP addresses. As a lawyer, subpoena them. But are they under my personal jurisdiction? What if they're not here in the United States, and I have no jurisdiction over them? Courts won't have any jurisdiction over them. [There are] all of these sort of technicalities that I know as a litigator. I know how hard it is to "follow the money." It's not always that simple. At the end of the day, all of that effort and money that goes into "following the money" may not end up being worth it, because all they'll do is [produce another cookbook] and call the chapter titles something a little bit different. Then I'm out of luck. … It's a cautionary tale for people who are dipping their toe in the creative waters.