And so it… begins? Continues? Let’s say continues to begin: Mushroom pickers urged to avoid foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI (seen on Hacker News).
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”.
This is considerably less amusing than Robot writes engineer’s obituary and it’s as good as any human’s tribute:
Brenda Tent retired from living at the age of old, surrounded by family and natural causes. A librarian from birth, Brenda was an avid collector of dust. She had a sweet heart and married her high school. She loved having hobbies and helping her sons to be disadvantaged youths. She had no horses but thought she did. The church gave her a choir because she sang like bird and looked like bird and Brenda was a bird. She owed us so many poems.
The funeral will be held in 1977 at heaven. In lieu of flowers, send Brenda more life.
It is honestly kind of surprising that it took this long; it’s been almost a full year since ChatGPT was released. AI-generated content like these “books” cost next to nothing to produce, so any amount of money you can make with from them is just good business… while at the same time clearly leads to a future where our world drowns in low-quality AI-generated trash “content”.
An Amazon spokesperson said: “We take matters like this seriously and are committed to providing a safe shopping and reading experience. We’re looking into this.”
Yeah, I won’t hold my breath, not just because I don’t trust Amazon, but because fixing this is essentially impossible (at scale). AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway indeed: