Amateur mushroom pickers have been urged to avoid foraging books sold on Amazon that appear to have been written by artificial intelligence chatbots.
Amazon has become a marketplace for AI-produced tomes that are being passed off as having been written by humans, with travel books among the popular categories for fake work.
Now a number of books have appeared on the online retailer’s site offering guides to wild mushroom foraging that also seem to be written by chatbots. The titles include “Wild Mushroom Cookbook: form [sic] forest to gourmet plate, a complete guide to wild mushroom cookery” and “The Supreme Mushrooms Books Field Guide of the South-West”.
Someone’s going to die following one of these books. If the people who created them can be identified, there should be harsh criminal penalties for doing it.
If they are selling it on Amazon Amazon can totally figure out who they are. If someone does following it and charges are pressed they will be found.
There should be harsh criminal penalties for Amazon as well.
It would be a fine that could be paid with about an hour’s worth of income.
Edit: Downvoting because you don’t like the truth?
I’m a big believer in changing laws so that when a company commits a serious offense, the individuals responsible end up serving time in prison. Fines are bullshit. If you’re gonna wish for things that aren’t gonna happen anyway, you may as well dream big.
There should already be imo. Reckless endangerment or some shit.
That is crazy dangerous. There are some really deadly mushrooms out there. People need to go to prison for this shit.
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lmao that cover is great
I have one of his (Mushrooms of North America?) that’s about an inch and a half thick and gives a comprehensive, more or less academic introduction to the field. Read it 10 or so years back and I’m not dead yet, so.
Written by an AI ten years ago? I didn’t think they were that advanced back then.
Incredible. I wish I lived in the western US so I had a reason to buy this book. I kind of just want it on a poster.
I thought that was duncen trussell on the cover. I figured a book about mushrooms seems like something he’d make.
I’ve ran into a few issues with AI written articles.
One for Assassins Creed Odessey on how to get wood quickly. It listed 5 methods and only 2 of them were in the game.
Another with articles on Baldurs Gate 3 talking about upgrading your equipment. I beat the game twice in 20 hours and never came across the workbench mentioned in the articles. It was at that time the articles were clearly parroting one another with false data.
Twice in 20 hours? Are you sure you didn’t just miss it?
Twice in 20 hours sounds a lot like this person hasn’t played the game at all… maybe that comment was written by AI.
Well, at least those issues don’t kill people.
The way publishing works, it is easy for Amazon to just check who is responsible for those books. Odd that they are not, I thought the US was a more litigious place.
Thats honestly not as true as some would have you believe. I think it stems from a case where a woman got third degree burns on her legs when a cup of mcdonalds coffee from a drive thru spilled. the company called the case supurflous, and used its vast megaphone to paint the woman as the one who was at fault. it worked. as a pre-teen I recall other kids talking with assurity about how the woman who spilled her coffee was absuing the system- coffee is hot! americans will sue over anything! The woman needed skin grafts and settled for 20k. ABC news called it “the poster child of frivilous lawsuits”.
I moved to Ireland in 2007. Insurance here is shockingly high- if you get in a car accident, the chances people put in “a claim” are HIGH. The bass player of a band I was in here had a €3,500 bass and didn’t work at age 29. He tripped on a paving stone while running downhill on a sidewalk/footpath and sued the farmer who lived next to it. The house I’m living in now has an extention that the previous owner was able to put on with money from “her claim”. Not sure what happened, but she worked for an insurance company. She’s living on an island and “is an artist” now. My friend visiting from the US backed into a car and dented the door panel. When she went to talk to the car’s owner’s, the wife of the family went out and got into the car and said she was in it when they hit the car and her neck hurt and needed to go to the hospital. There were 7 of us there, inculding the irish home owners of the house we were staying in and the cop believed us over her.
These are anticdotal stories from my personal experience here in Ireland. There used to be an Oktoberfest event down on the water on the docklands, it was nice. I asked one of the organizers a year or so ago why they stopped and they said “they were losing money because of the insurance premiums”. My car insurance here first year was €1600 annually, when it was $185 annually in the US (2006 or so).
I lived in the US a lot longer than I’ve lived here, and I never knew anyone who sued anyone else there.
To back up your point but also clarify, the woman with the McDonald’s coffee initially offered to settled for 20k, but McDonald’s wouldn’t offer more than $800. The jury awarded her $3mil. It was later reduced but then settled confidentially. McDonald’s did (as you point out) produce a major smear campaign against her and completely downplayed her injuries. iirc, her the injuries included third degree burns, fusion of labia to her thigh, and multiple skin grafts. The more you learn about it, the worse it gets. We were all brainwashed into thinking it was poster child for frivolous lawsuits. https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts
Yeah, thanks for that. Especially having me thinking about labia being fused to the thigh first thing in the morning. Hello, sunday!
People who are foraging the woods for mushrooms aren’t exactly the same who can afford high prices lawyers.
Personal injury lawyers will work on commission for things like this.
Rich people have better lawyers, though.
Everyone worried Skynet would create killer robots but instead they are writing shitty books. A kills a kill I guess.
Ohhhh shit, this explains that Russian rocket scientist!
He shoots, he scores!
Article starts off with “scores 100% on AI detection tests” wtf. They should do a little research on that statement. Even OpenAI gave up trying to detect that shit. It’s not possible. The machines are mimicking human speech. And doing better than many actual human authors. You can’t detect that shit.
These Skynet plots to wiping out the human race are getting really convoluted as they keep making Terminator sequels/prequels. I guess they’re going for the long game by going after the mushroom foragers first.
Mmm boletes
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How can anyone be stupid enough to start picking musrooms based on what a book says? This is a skill that should be taught by an experienced person.
