AI Is Writing Books About Foraging. What Could Go Wrong?
AI Is Writing Books About Foraging. What Could Go Wrong?
Experienced foragers worry that the new wave of foraging guides produced by artificial intelligence provide misleading—even dangerous—information to novice foragers, and lack details on how to harvest in an ecologically responsible way.
Horrific painful death from liver failure when the books lead people to eat the wrong mushrooms
Destruction of ecosystems by people unfamiliar with how to responsibly forage
Flooding of wrong and plagiarized information, drowning out experts and actual real, correct information
There's literally no positive side of this. At all.
Darwin awards will benefit - if that's the right term.
AI isn't writing the books. Humans are directing AI to write the books to scam people.
This is no different from a person who has no fucking clue about foraging writing their own foraging book. Amazon has had a scam writing problem with their book catalogue for years now. AI is just making that process easier.
(Look, I know the video is long, but it's really good content.)
This is what people don’t get. Information is always unreliable when not from a trusted source. Just because it’s easier to generate that kind of information now doesn’t mean it’s a new problem.
This is what real foraging guides look like. If the cover doesn't look like this you've got to go and look up the author and their bonafides before trusting anything in their book. If you're new to foraging, you should be bringing a few books or guides with you for cross referencing and confirmation of species.
That is such a great book too. David Arora also does a field guide called Mushrooms Demystified. The cover is a lot more what you would expect for a mushroom field guide, though
How Amazon can think that publishing 3 books a day is acceptable???
It's literally impossible to produce 3 books a day, unless it's something menial like "how to pee, in three simple steps"
Amazon is making their cut. They literally do not care.
I've written reviews and tried to find ways to report listings where people were selling grills with galvanized grates. Cooking on or in something galvanized can kill you. It's extremely hazardous. But Amazon doesn't care. Nothing ever happens.
I'm surprised they don't sell "How to Rip off Idiots", a giant, $500 leather-bound hardcover book with over 1,000 heavyweight blank pages.
I think 95% of the books on "how to get rich quick" are essentially variations on the theme "write a guide on how to get rich and sell it to other people"
I had a friend in high school that every week came with the new "money solution" found on a forum called "warrior", and he tried to crowndfund as much as possible in the class to pay for it... And in the end was something super simple like "sell this guide to others" or simply stupid like "go outside a stadium during a sport event and set an illegal face painting kiosk" or "do dropshipping on ebay using an Amazon prime trial account"
While a nicely-bound blank book with heavy paper isn't worth $500, it isn't entirely worthless, either. To really rip buyers off, it has to be an ebook or print-on-demand. As has already been demonstrated.
Ya, it should be 3 books a week, or even a month, imo.
I do see how someone could publish 3 books in a day, by releasing a full trilogy all together. But beyond that, you really are only looking at people making utter garbage.If you are publishing an existing catalogue, sure, but yeah.
Implicit trust is a horrible idea for something like this.
Well amazon's quality control is automated. So we have algorithms approving books written by algorithms, sold to humans who die as a result of the bad information. They're ganging up on us! Lol
We all thought AI was going to turn on us and murder us, but no, it will be its incompetence which does us in.
It would be the incompetence of those who trusted an AI generated foraging guide.
And of course, we learned during covid that the general public are just great at looking after their personal health by picking good sources for their health information.
The problem is realising the books are AI generated
"The Forager's Harvest" is one of the best guidebooks out there for foraging. Those titles are insidiously close, and can easily trick people who aren't paying enough attention.
Paying close attention is ironically very important if you're interested in foraging
Here, finally, is the true advantage of a physical bookstore. You can flip through a book and tell right away that it is AI generated crap if you have even a small amount of domain knowledge.
Don't most Kindle books permit you to download a free sample?
The only way to be sure is to buy it from an outdoor store directly, or go to an actual bookstore (if you still have any nearby)