[HN Gopher] Mushroom pickers urged: Avoid Amazon foraging books,...
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Mushroom pickers urged: Avoid Amazon foraging books, appear to be
written by AI
Author : sandebert
Score : 95 points
Date : 2023-09-01 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| nkrisc wrote:
| It seems to me that many books on Amazon are now AI generated
| trash. I received a book as gift for my son, purchased from
| Amazon, that was completely nonsensical. It was about caves.
| Here's a quote:
|
| "Some of the most common animals found in the caves are
| stalactites and calcite, while others are caves."
|
| The whole book was absurd sentences like that. Every page was a
| single paragraph accompanied by a random picture of a cave on the
| opposite page.
|
| The "publisher" has _hundreds_ of "books" about every topic
| imaginable. If you search "{topic} for kids" one of their books
| would come up. These texts have no redeeming quality or value.
| Their mere existence is a net-negative for society.
|
| Amazon is selling this trash as if it were a real book. It's
| predatory at best.
| stefan_ wrote:
| And chances are Amazon is even printing it! They took their
| marketplace approach to publishing: allow anyone and anything
| to upload any crap (or other peoples copyrighted material) and
| sell it immediately, with no oversight or quality control.
| klntsky wrote:
| > Some of the most common animals found in the caves are
| stalactites and calcite, while others are caves.
|
| Things like this will prepare your child to the world we are
| moving into
| Hikikomori wrote:
| https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
| klyrs wrote:
| Please name and shame.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Seriously. It's not libel if it's true and OP would be doing
| a favor.
| mindslight wrote:
| OP did - "Amazon". That's the company that people are
| trusting to be offering real products, that isn't actually
| doing much in the way of QA, and instead just abusing
| customer labor to do QA and a "no fault return".
| dvh wrote:
| Reminds me of an obituary allegedly written by ai:
|
| 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.
| jshprentz wrote:
| Writing in The Mirror two years ago, OliviaRose Fox traced
| [1] this humorous obituary to a 2020 book by Keaton Patti, _I
| Forced a Bot to Write This Book: A.I. Meets B.S._ [2]
|
| [1] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/robot-writes-
| engineers...
|
| [2] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/I-Forced-a-Bot-to-
| Wri...
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| This feels like another place that libraries can be valuable, as
| curators of content.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Regardless of the AI detection score I wouldn't trust a random
| book on Amazon where safety was involved. Even before LLM spam
| there was low quality self published garbage, algorithmic or
| otherwise.
| vkou wrote:
| > low quality self published garbage, algorithmic or otherwise.
|
| To elaborate on this - a common scam that people used to run
| was to pay a ghostwriter ~$750 to 'write' a 'book' that had
| ~50-80 pages of bullshit word salad.
|
| They'd then try to stick a real author's name on it, and try to
| sell it.
|
| (Amazon has started putting in a _little_ bit of effort at
| detecting this scam, so now the scammers have pivoted[1] to
| selling suckers a training course on how to do this.)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Also low-quality traditionally published garbage.
| ethanbond wrote:
| This is the equivalent of chiming in "75% of users eh? So
| that's what... 3 out of every 4?"
|
| Yeah, we all know that the problems that AI is likely to
| amplify are already problems. The question is whether or not
| those problems will get _worse_.
|
| No matter how imperfect the current world is, one which is
| _worse_ is 1) always possible and 2) worth preventing.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| I was reacting to the implication that "traditionally
| published" is some sort of badge of quality.
|
| Remember "Snooki"?
|
| Traditionally-published.
|
| I could name dozens, nay, hundreds of others.
|
| In fact, "traditionally published" simply means that a big
| conglomerate thought it would make a buck. Quality doesn't
| enter into the equation. At all.
| ethanbond wrote:
| A big conglomerate [with access to market data on the
| demand side and tons of book optionality on the supply
| side] thinking it would make a buck absolutely _is_ an
| additional filter for quality that doesn't exist for AI-
| written self-published books.
|
| Real businesses and real authors also tend to be
| concerned about getting sued for things like libel or
| defamation, or just generally having their brand
| reputations dragged through the mud after releasing
| mislabeled and subpar products.
|
| It's definitely an imperfect filter, sure, but then just
| see my original comment.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| My intuition is that given the literal life or death nature of
| the enterprise, mushroom pickers should avoid leaning solely on
| any book, AI produced or not.
|
| Mushrooms in different parts of the world look different. There
| can be subtleties that the books leave out. Anybody can publish a
| book and most books disclaim liability.
|
| The best way is probably to find a local trusted, experienced
| mushroom picker that you trust and follow them around for a bit.
|
| There is a reason that surgeons to be are not just given a
| textbook on surgery and told to just read the book and they will
| be fine. Instead they follow around experienced surgeons for a
| few years learning from them.
| tapland wrote:
| There's a reason for that and one of the reaaons is surgeries
| don't primarily happen a few weeks a year and require you to
| find happy amateurs to teach you around where you plan to do
| them going forward.
| zzzeek wrote:
| AI would be used (unsafely) to classify mushrooms, this exact
| prediction at 17:09 in Angela Collier's excellent "AI does not
| exist but it will ruin everything anyway" video, which I
| recommend for anyone interested in the subject:
| https://youtu.be/EUrOxh_0leE?t=1029
| bassrattle wrote:
| Yes, I recently bought a vegan cookbook just to find it full of
| AI nonsense, encouraging me to try it with beef or chicken. If
| you are looking for a new book on any topic, don't start on
| Amazon. Ironic that Amazon, originally a bookstore, can't be
| trusted to sell real books.
| thfuran wrote:
| Can they be trusted to sell real anything?
| jerlam wrote:
| What does a "book" really mean in the current era of online
| marketplaces that accept (and promote) self-publishing? A book is
| now just a differently formatted PDF file. It's not that
| different from any web site. Calling something a book conveys no
| authority.
|
| In the past, getting a physical book into your local bookstore
| meant that someone had to spend money to physically print the
| book and have agreements with bookstores to physically put the
| book on their shelves. This threshold prevented garbage books
| from being made and distributed, because you had to convince
| someone to invest in the book and distribution.
|
| Of course, there were always self-published books available, but
| they wouldn't be in the same locations as other mass-market
| books. You could physically inspect the book and realize that it
| was lower quality. These AI generated books are the equivalent of
| a bunch of papers stapled together.
|
| The Amazon "bookstore" has become the same as any other "App
| store" - full of garbage, to prey on less discerning users and
| vulnerable to the same kinds of manipulation.
| qubex wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before some AI 'textbook' on some
| obscure field of medicine or surgery gets somebody killed.
| barelyauser wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before some internet "thing" on some
| obscure field of medicine or surgery gets somebody killed.
|
| There is no Utopy. Embrace the nature of reality. AI will
| become norm, and it will bring all the good and bad with it.
| convolvatron wrote:
| it may be true that there is no other path, but we really
| can't help but notice that the bulk of human knowledge is
| being replaced by literal noise. that is going to be a real
| problem.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| We don't have to accept that.
|
| We regulated formaldehyde out of food, mercury out of
| "medicine," and fire safety into workplaces. AI doesn't get
| to be special just because some business would rather be
| negligent.
| leephillips wrote:
| It doesn't matter the subject. Know what you are reading and who
| wrote it. Be selective. If you want to learn about an empirical
| subject such as this, read things written by a human who is an
| expert in the field.
|
| Don't read Wikipedia, crap produced by "AI" programs, or
| anonymous semiliterate trash on the internet. It's up to you to
| value your time and to filter what comes into your brain.
| ajuc wrote:
| Holy shit, that's cold.
| causality0 wrote:
| Why has the original title been edited to make it much less
| clear?
| [deleted]
| jiggawatts wrote:
| This is the classic tragedy of the commons.
|
| Pro tip to Bezos: it has a tragic ending.
| everforward wrote:
| If what that Twitter post is saying is true, I don't think this
| will last long. This sounds like it could be both civilly and
| criminally negligent if someone is actually harmed and the
| authors can't come up with a very convincing "we tried to verify
| but were wrong" story.
|
| If they're literally just ingesting existing mushrooms books into
| an AI and publishing the output without verification or review, I
| think it would be hard to defend against negligence claims.
| ajacksified wrote:
| Hot takes aside, if you're looking for great foraging books, I'd
| suggest anything by David Arora, such as "All That the Rain
| Promises and More" and "Mushrooms Demystified". The National
| Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms is, of
| course, pretty good too.
|
| Outside of identification, "Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita
| Nightmares" and "Radical Mycology" are good reads too.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| came here to suggest "All That the Rain Promises and More".
| it's a fantastic book with spore identification as well.
|
| thanks to that book, I've eaten ~10 additional fungi that I
| would not have eaten before, and they were all quite delicious.
|
| also, thanks to that book, I did spore tests on mushrooms that
| I was "pretty sure" were correct, and found out that I was
| wrong.
|
| do your research, and you may find some delicious new meals.
| don't, and you may find death.
| anarticle wrote:
| Turns out libraries will be sitting on gold mines, the only cache
| of books guaranteed to not be tainted by AI! :D
| likenesstheft wrote:
| Brick & mortar bookstores about to make a huge comeback.
| _jal wrote:
| I think I'm at the point where "platform" stores are more hassle
| than they're worth. Saving a buck doesn't mean much when they
| aren't delivering the product you wanted.
|
| Amazon is a huge vending machine stocked by anonymous third
| parties. That's useful in a few ways, and a huge mess in too many
| others. I'd already dropped them because their logistics are
| utter crap for me, but they seem to have no interest in
| cultivating consumer trust, so I doubt this will change after I
| move.
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(page generated 2023-09-01 23:02 UTC)