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”.
I have one of his (Mushrooms of North America?) that’s about an inch and a half thick and gives a comprehensive, more or less academic introduction to the field. Read it 10 or so years back and I’m not dead yet, so.
Written by an AI ten years ago? I didn’t think they were that advanced back then.