Someone is Publishing Dangerous Wild Mushroom Foraging Books Written by AI

Well, at least someone is figuring out a way to make money with AI.

Honestly though, this looks like yet another story promoting the idea that “AI needs regulation,” something that I strongly disagree with.

If anything, AI needs to be deregulated and given to the people. It belongs to all of us, and we all deserve access. These companies are all government subsidized. We paid for the development of AI and we deserve equal use.

The Guardian:

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”.

Four samples from the books were examined for the Guardian by Originality.ai, a US firm that detects AI content. The company said every sample had a rating of 100% on its AI detection score, meaning that its systems are highly confident that the books were written by a chatbot such as ChatGPT.

…

Leon Frey, a foraging guide and field mycologist at Cornwall-based Family Foraging Kitchen, which organises foraging field trips, said the samples he had seen contained serious flaws such as referring to “smell and taste” as an identifying feature. “This seems to encourage tasting as a method of identification. This should absolutely not be the case,” he said.

Some wild mushrooms, like the highly poisonous death cap, which can be mistaken for edible varieties, are toxic.

Well.

If people poison themselves because they read an AI mushroom book that told them to eat poison… let’s just say there are bigger problems in the world than this issue.

It’s a bigger problem, for instance, that I can’t use AI because it keeps saying I’m a racist.