The AI grift that can literally poison you
The AI grift that can literally poison you
Tldr: Use reliable sources when hunting mushrooms.
While agreed, how do you find the reliable surfaces amid the sea of garbage, especially when you're first starting out?
before:2023
Buy a book published more that a couple of years ago. Or ask the people living in the area (the older the better, normally ). Or ask the people living in the area where you can have the mushrooms checked, they usually know where to go.
In the absence of a local club, I'm not sure. I mean, have a look at the cover on this one—I understand that's considered one of the more reliable and informative guides for the locations it covers, which is why it's still in print after 30+ years, but the only reason that photo doesn't look AI generated is that you can't imagine how they would have come up with the prompt . . .
“They had mushroom structures that don’t quite make sense,” says Trybuch. They were the mycological equivalent of a picture of a hot blonde with six fingers and too many teeth.
🤣
prompt is "hot blonde mushroom with six fingers and too many teeth"
Delicious!
You know you're a little too into mushrooms if you are comparing them to hot blondes
This is the best summary I could come up with:
He’s a software engineer and volunteer secretary for the New York Mycological Society, a nonprofit devoted to “spreading knowledge, love and appreciation of fungi.” He knows mushrooms and he knows AI, and he thought the covers of these books were probably AI-generated.
Any readers looking to try to use these books to figure out which mushrooms were safe to eat and which weren’t would be out of luck, which to Trybuch was seriously concerning.
Garbage ebooks have been a problem on Amazon for at least a decade, but — not unlike many strains of fungi — they’ve exploded over the last few years.
Then they give the outline to a wildly underpaid ghostwriter to flesh it out into something that will pass muster as a real book.
The model is a dangerously inviting prospect for anyone who’s ever toyed with the idea of publishing a book but doesn’t want to actually write one.
The grift is that technology and retail platforms have incentivized a race to the bottom when it comes to selling books.
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