‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All over Amazon | Hacker News Reader

‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All over Amazon

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53 pointsorangeteacups13 comments

Don't order anything that is "life or death" on Amazon.

There are already supply chain issues, commingling of different sellers, etc.

Don't order anything on Amazon, actually.

In the last decade I’ve gone from buying almost everything from Amazon to going out of my way to not order anything at all from them.

I have begun to wonder if these are PR pieces for AI detection companies.

I was disappointed to see the use of ZeroGPT in this article as well. A mushroom foraging guide should be written by a properly credentialed expert. A journalist should be able to contact that expert and verify that they wrote the book. That's what's necessary here, not the use of anti-AI tools. And that's what the article does later with "Dr. Kimberly Thorpe". ZeroGPT was not necessary at all.

Yeah, I think that was the point that they COULDN'T contact the "expert who wrote the book" because they couldn't exist and then ZeroGPT was the one-two punch to "prove" it was AI.

That said, MY biggest takeaway from the article was "Hm, ZeroGPT, wonder how that works?"

It mostly doesn't. There's a huge controversy any tools like this being used to accuse students of using AI and the false positive rate is bad.

Yeah a quick look on their (ZeroGPT) website and it seems like it's basically just a model itself trained on human vs. AI text?

It caught what I tested with 100% accuracy but I didn't spend more than a few minutes playing with it.

Honestly feel like the topic of AI has become massively over-saturated lately too.

It's been getting an awful lot of interest and attention since ChatGPT, which is totally fair, but the hype is wearing thin.

Amazon doesn't necessarily have an 'AI-generated books' problem, it has a quality control problem due to decisions it's made around managing inventory and acting as a distributor for third party merchants. That quality control problem affects almost everything Amazon sells on a marketplace that has steadily enshittificated itself over the past several years, and mass-producing zero-effort ebooks has been going on ever since you could self-publish there.

Something about this reminds me of the idea of lists of reputable or renowned books in fields of study. For example, the “Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography” which gives some useful titles, but then also has an entry for the “worst calculus book ever written”. It makes me think there should be some similar list for people who are getting into the potentially dangerous activity of gathering mushrooms.

That, in a nutshell, is the definition of an expert- a once valued member of society, but just another shmoe in the era of mass personal vanity publishing.

The book is Calculus by Janusz for those wondering.

Le Petit Larousse single-volume encyclopedia included a page of mushrooms and their names. A couple of decades ago they had a typo that misnamed a mushroom, killing some people. The company issued a sticker you could glue over the erroneous page.

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