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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

#51
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…

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.

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

#52

This has got to be settlement-chasing, directly akin to the people who throw themselves into stopped cars in Russia for insurance fraud purposes, only to be captured on dash-cam video and derisively immortalized on social media. The other viable explanation is "but Google Maps told me to drive off the pier."

It seems too random to be a scam, the perpetrator needs to find a mushroom book with an error in it to do the scam in the first place.

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

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch. That web comic did not age gracefully.

'Age?' It's three months old.

I read the parent comment to contrast the 3-month-old vintage of Penny Arcade with its first couple of decades:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/archive/

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch. That web comic did not age gracefully.

'Age?' It's three months old.

I guess OP is talking about the visual style of this comic which started in 1998. It’s very ugly nowadays.

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

#55

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.

Imagine this being one of the first instances of AI being sentient? The author being an AI releasing random stuff like the book.

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

#57
It's wild to me that these sorts of stories provoke - on HN of all places - frothy calls for state intervention. Is it by design? Is this some dark campaign to stifle open source LLM development?

Some mushrooms are horribly poisonous. That's the nature into which we were born. It's not a consequence of policy, and won't be fixed by policy.

People need to learn to be careful about sources of information, with care in proportion to consequences. State intervention will preclude that evolutionary step, almost certainly without actually ameliorating the problem.

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

#60
Why are you eating wild mushrooms ?

Even if no one did anything wrong, you might misidentify it in the field. Unless you're very experienced in this field this feels like a very risky and stupid thing to do.

This isn't an AI problem. This is a "Don't eat things growing in the woods" problem.

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