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.
Being dramatically easier IS a problem, though.
Yes, but not a really big one since people should learn how to deal with information and trustworthiness of them anyway
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.
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.
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
“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
