Mushroom pickers urged: Avoid Amazon foraging books, appear to be written by AI

That could pretty easily kill someone. We already have laws in place to handle this, why are they not being applied and enforced?

The staff botanist at my land trust says, “all mushrooms are edible, once.”

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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 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.

Examples of prose from the books include: “The sweet smell of freshly cooked mushrooms wafted through the air, bringing back fond memories of my mother” and “Foraging for wild mushrooms is a deeply rewarding experience that connects us with nature’s abundance and the rich tapestry of flowers that the Earth provides.”

The AI-generated works had also been highlighted by the New York Mycological Society, which posted on X, formerly known as Twitter: “@Amazon and other retail outlets have been inundated with AI foraging and identification books.

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