> It lists the author as having a Masters Degree in Mycology from University of East Ontario. A search later revealed there is no "University of East Ontario."
This has got to be criminal negligence.
People have been murdering since the beginning of time, but machine guns make it easy to murder a lot of people very fast. So we don’t just have laws against murder, but we have laws restricting access to machine guns.
AI tools make it possible to spread misinformation and disinformation much faster, because you can produce a high quantity of it really quickly. Just like how a machine gun shoots a lot of bullets really quickly. It’s not a fundamentally different type of thing, just a new scale / speed.
I disagree, a change in degree can indeed be a change in type. Flashbangs and party poppers are functionally the same thing if you look at them strictly mechanically, but we treat them very very differently.
Guns and machine guns are the same but we treat them differently.
Chances are the lazy authors using an AI generator would actually have known quite enough to write a reasonably safe-ish identification book, despite their laughably fake credentials, they just would not be good at writing and took the shortcut to make up for that.
It's like killing someone driving a heavy SUV while under the influence, vs killing someone pushing a heavy SUV while under the influence. Both are bad, but one is infinitely more likely to happen than the other.
Err, at least 1 person: English As She is Spoke[1] was published in 1883 and was a lot more involved (lots of literal translation by an author who didn't speak English)
Are you saying this is not the motivation for doing so with LLMs?
An LLM writing the same would instead create a plausible but wrong book. A layperson could be tricked by this – crucially wrong sentences would be sandwiched in between pages and pages of superficially right ones.
There is a vast ocean of difference between these two. Producing something plausible with no foreknowledge of the subject matter became possible.
Trusted/proven sources are the ones that should be protected by law; ie doctors, engineers, etc.
Otherwise let's start prosecuting everyone's grandparents for saying that throwing salt over your shoulder wards off bad luck.
There's more intelligence in this AI guide, than there is in the majority of college diploma's coming out of of Canada today.
Regulation like the EU’s AI Act (and even more strict) should be in effect worldwide. Corps have been running the show but naturally their focus is on monetisation rather than what their creations actually do.
This isn’t an AI issue, it’s a basic scam/fraud issue.
Just to clarify, the reddit post is 99% creative writing, it's a fake story created by a new Reddit account.
The difference between those two things is rather important.
> skeptics normally recommend not disbelief but suspension of belief, i.e. maintaining a neutral attitude that neither affirms nor denies the claim.
This makes a lot more sense to me. Regardless, I believe there is plenty of evidence in the Reddit thread that this is indeed a false story - it's just when I initially read your comment I hadn't considered that evidence since you didn't mention it.
This has to be some kind of a new level of idiocy. I mean, use AI to make junk sci-fi stories, and generate fake authors all day. But going for a book about mushrooms deserves a special stupidity and evilness award.
No excuse, obviously. But it could explain how whoever's running the scam could have run it off this cliff - probably others, too.
It's been a couple years since I bought even paper books off Amazon. Used should theoretically be closer to OK, but eBay sellers are cheaper and much more trustworthy.