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Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

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Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

#111
post #93
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have proof or did you mean "as it's a brand new account then it's probably made up"? The difference between those two things is rather important.

The other comment under mine replied for me. Also, something is false until evidence is provided, not the opposite. In this case, I'm very confident that the post is creative writing.

What is the evidence that the story is false then? You can't require a high standard to believe something is true but not that it's false. That would be a contradiction.

Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

#112
post #76
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not an AI apologist by any stretch, but how is this different from some incompetent person criminally-negligently assembling and publishing a book without AI help? Shouldn’t existing legislation already cover this? I’d also assume that most books will be written with AI help in some way or another in the future.

Not different at all. But who would go through the pains of manually making up a mushroom identification book, while perhaps being quite clueless about the topic, on the faint hope of selling a few copies? Knowledge is not the bottleneck. 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 credential…

> Not different at all. But who would go through the pains of manually making up a mushroom identification book, while perhaps being quite clueless about the topic, on the faint hope of selling a few copies? Knowledge is not the bottleneck.

Are you saying this is not the motivation for doing so with LLMs?

Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

#113
post #111
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other comment under mine replied for me. Also, something is false until evidence is provided, not the opposite. In this case, I'm very confident that the post is creative writing.

What is the evidence that the story is false then? You can't require a high standard to believe something is true but not that it's false. That would be a contradiction.

There is no contradiction, my logic follows a common approach in skepticism, where claims are treated as false until evidence is provided.

Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

#114
post #34

This was something that was bound to happen and is going to happen again unless we get more serious regulation around AI publishing. > 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.

I’m not an AI apologist by any stretch, but how is this different from some incompetent person criminally-negligently assembling and publishing a book without AI help? Shouldn’t existing legislation already cover this? I’d also assume that most books will be written with AI help in some way or another in the future.

Because assembling and publishing a book without AI help is much harder while you can publish 10's (if not 100's in the future) of books with AI. Much harder to regulate due to the sheer amount of them.

Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

#117

This was something that was bound to happen and is going to happen again unless we get more serious regulation around AI publishing. > 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.

Imaginary Universities in Canada, are a government supported racket. It is not for no reason that the UN condemns Canada for modern slavery with their temporary foreign worker program, that runs off the back of fleece-u colleges.

There's more intelligence in this AI guide, than there is in the majority of college diploma's coming out of of Canada today.

Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

#118
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I searched for the title of the book and nothing came up. When does searching for something NOT bring up amazon links?

It sounds like it wasn’t an Amazon product. Maybe it is some very niche UK site or something.

Amazon sells all kinds of crap. I doubt there's any reason they wouldn't stock it.

Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

#119
post #66
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but what exactly do you want to do? Require an indication like “x% of this book was generated by AI and not competently proof-read”? And how would you enforce it? I have a hard time envisioning a practical way to tackle this. The machine-gun analogy doesn’t quite carry over here.

There're serious lobbying efforts by industry incumbents and authoritarians to actually apply arms-like restrictions for access to AI. You'd need a special license to be able to create/run your own powerful models legally. I presume that's what they're getting at.

They could instead go with increased or specified special liabilities for content spammers.

Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book

#120
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not an AI apologist by any stretch, but how is this different from some incompetent person criminally-negligently assembling and publishing a book without AI help? Shouldn’t existing legislation already cover this? I’d also assume that most books will be written with AI help in some way or another in the future.

Think about it like owning a machine gun. 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…

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