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AI Is Writing Books About Foraging. What Could Go Wrong? (civileats.com)
submitted 1 year ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[-] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 54 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] baggins@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

Darwin awards will benefit - if that's the right term.

[-] Gnugit@aussie.zone 22 points 1 year ago

I feel for the smart kids or eagar adults that want to learn and get caught up in this.

Darwin awards is a little harsh and I am a huge Darwin awards fan myself.

[-] baggins@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

I see your point, but anyone with an ounce of intelligence will steer well clear of these.

That said, Amazon should be held responsible for deliberately promoting false and dangerous information.

[-] antizero99@lemmynsfw.com 12 points 1 year ago

It's not that easy to steer clear of. I've bought a couple of books on other topics from Amazon and realized when they arrived that they weren't worth the cost of the paper they were printed on. It's easy enough to notice it's bullshit, it's harder to avoid spending money and time on them in the first place.

[-] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago

This right here. Especially in a market completely flooded by this shit, and everything looks the same, it makes it look like it has legitimacy. It makes finding authentic info nearly impossible. Even for a super tech-savvy crowd that might know what markets are being devoured by AI pablum, sorting through the shit is a monumental task. Your average person isn't going to be able to do that.

People will be fooled because they're already being fooled, and it's not their fault. It's not some far off thing. It's already happening. And blasting people in the face with a firehose of this shit is the goal: don't let anyone have an opportunity to be able to tell the good from the bad. Bury everything in the sludge.

[-] wahming 1 points 1 year ago

How is this related to the Darwin awards, if you're just getting fooled by a book that you thought was trustworthy?

[-] baggins@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

Trusting Amazon's AI produced books.

[-] LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago

I guess it depends how obvious it is that they're AI-generated

[-] baggins@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

True. Does it not say or does it even give a fictitious author? Amazon should be held accountable if that's the case.

[-] LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

Amazon should be held accountable for a lot of things, let's face it...

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.)

[-] lol3droflxp@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] ripcord@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago

Being dramatically easier IS a problem, though.

[-] lol3droflxp@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, but not a really big one since people should learn how to deal with information and trustworthiness of them anyway

[-] akwd169@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago

Should learn yes, but are they? Who is teaching them? In my experience, many people who don't seem to think they know how to judge accurate information online.

They seem to go by how convincing it sounds and how smart the person sounds. So convincing pseudoscience is all it takes to have a bunch of people sure it must be legit and no one is really teaching them otherwise.

Amazon is feeding into this by taking advantage of peoples trust in large companies. People also seem to assume that well, it's amazon, they're a big global company, they must be trustworthy and thus most of what they sell is too.

I don't think that most people are even aware that alot of the things on amazon are from third party sellers either.

[-] PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

Thats often the case with AI critical stories.

Most of the time ML is faulted for a problem its root lays way deeper.

[-] LallyLuckFarm@beehaw.org 25 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Vodulas@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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"

[-] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

Don't forget the unsafe electrical plugs, like male-to-male.

[-] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Holy shit I didn't want to believe they'd actually allow that. That maybe they did have some extreme far out line in the sand where they'd do something. And now I'm just totally at a loss

[-] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 8 points 1 year ago

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"

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] ram@bookwormstory.social 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] upstream@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

If you are publishing an existing catalogue, sure, but yeah.

Implicit trust is a horrible idea for something like this.

[-] bingbong@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago

"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.

[-] Dr_Cog@mander.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Paying close attention is ironically very important if you're interested in foraging

[-] Devi@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

We all thought AI was going to turn on us and murder us, but no, it will be its incompetence which does us in.

[-] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

It would be the incompetence of those who trusted an AI generated foraging guide.

[-] wahming 10 points 1 year ago

The problem is realising the books are AI generated

[-] Devi@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] fox_the_apprentice@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 1 year ago

Don't most Kindle books permit you to download a free sample?

[-] storksforlegs@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

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)

this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
144 points (100.0% liked)

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