Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obligatory PA Comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/05/27/a-very-particu...
Ouch. That web comic did not age gracefully.
'Age?' It's three months old.
Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
41–50 of 123 posts
Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#42Well the morale is: don't eat wild mushrooms no matter the source (pick them yourself or picked by an "expert"). At least that's my rule. There's a ton of cultivated mushrooms and a ton of other tasty safe foods to choose from, I don't give a fuck how exotic the wild mushrooms flavor would be.
I'm not curios. Because curiosity killed the cat.
Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The poster doesn’t claim they ate morels. The section about morels was an example for something unrelated to the poisoning.
The fact that these people claim mushroom poisoning but don't say what kind of mushrooms they were looking for makes you... more? less? willing to buy the story? They mentioned morels, which are sort of plausible (dates excepted) since false morels aren't going to kill you. What kind of mushroom would they be hunting in late July where their poisoning wouldn't be actually-newsworthy?
They might be novices who got the book as the start of their search, right? Since it could have any type of AI hallucinated mushroom with any type of AI hallucinated description. Are there really no non-deadly mushrooms in the UK in the late July?
They don’t necessarily have to be plausible or near misses or anything, right?
Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#44Do we believe this story? It's a Reddit "LegalAdvice" thread. It's not morel season in the UK right now; false morels are also March-May produce.
I generally distrust Reddit threads, but it's entirely plausible to me. I was once gifted a cookbook on Amazon that was full of pre-LLM "sludge" of suspect internet-collected recipes along with a stock photo of an author with fake credentials (her author page is still up, although her books have been pulled and apparently she's a man now https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0716Q2Y4Z/about)
When I left a negative review pointing out that the author was a stock photo (entire content: "The author of this book is a fraud. There is no Tina B. Baker, she is a stock photo."), Amazon pulled the review saying it violated their guidelines.
Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#45This 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.
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 a machine gun shoots a lot of bullets really quickly. It’s not a fundamentally different type of thing, just a new scale / speed.
Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#46This 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.
Sounds more like a scam.
And the problem is that most legal systems have completely dropped the ball on scam enforcement, and large companies have since taken note and now partake in the practice of facilitating or outright committing scams themselves.
This isn’t an AI issue, it’s a basic scam/fraud issue.
Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#47Do we believe this story? It's a Reddit "LegalAdvice" thread. It's not morel season in the UK right now; false morels are also March-May produce.
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.
Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#48Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#49Well the morale is: don't eat wild mushrooms no matter the source (pick them yourself or picked by an "expert"). At least that's my rule. There's a ton of cultivated mushrooms and a ton of other tasty safe foods to choose from, I don't give a fuck how exotic the wild mushrooms flavor would be. I'm not curios. Because curiosity killed the cat.
Picked by a local expert.
With regional variations, any book about wild mushrooms is bound to be partly wrong.
Re: Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book
#50Earlier 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…
>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.