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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

#61

Post by alwa »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #22
tptacek wrote: post #3

Do 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.

Yeah, while this story is absolutely plausible , plausible does not necessarily mean true . OP is a new account with suspiciously few details that would permit fact-checking, and I think I'd call this one ragebait until proven otherwise. (That does not mean that this couldn't happen or that there isn't a risk of it happening, but everyone here hopefully knew that before this thread. I'm saying it shouldn't adjust you…

I share your suspicion of the thin details. And what details they do provide smell funny too. I’m especially skeptical of this supposed cloak and dagger business:

> My wife just received an email from the online retailer. She has been asked to "Not take any photographs or copies of the product in question due to copyright issues" and it states, "the product must be returned immediately by special delivery by [DATE]." There's some other statements as well about our account being terminated if we fail to return the product by the specific date. We've got a lot of movies and series that we have purchased over the years on this account, I wouldn't want to lose them.

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

#62

Post by croes »

the_snooze wrote: post #50
klodolph wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Parent says basically the same.

Guns and machine guns are the same but we treat them differently.

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

#64

Post by alexey-salmin »

paulgb wrote: post #44
tptacek wrote: post #3

Do 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 r…

Sure, but a fact of a story being plausible not only increases a probability of it being true, but also increases a probability of someone faking it because it's so plausible. Chances that someone would do exactly that on reddit are very high.

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

#65

Post by GaggiX »

samtheDamned wrote: post #6

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.

>This was something that was bound to happen and is going to happen again

Just to clarify, the reddit post is 99% creative writing, it's a fake story created by a new Reddit account.

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

#66

Post by 3np »

layer8 wrote: post #51
klodolph wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#67

Post by kibwen »

999900000999 wrote: post #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.

> Why are you eating wild mushrooms ?

Perhaps they asked ChatGPT and were told it was a great idea to eat wild mushrooms.

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

This is a misinformation problem, which you can't solve simply by saying "you should have been better informed". The whole problem of AIs accelerating the post-truth age is that reliable sources are becoming scarcer at an exponential rate.

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

#68

Post by throwanem »

alwa wrote: post #53
throwanem wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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/

Oh. Sure, I guess that's a take. Expecting the artist and writer to have learned nothing of their craft in the 26 years they've spent pursuing it as a profession seems extremely silly to me, but if someone finds that a sensible way to look at the work, I don't see what it would benefit anyone for me to try to gainsay them.

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

#69

Post by maxerickson »

samtheDamned wrote: post #6

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.

For the publisher, it would be malfeasance, not negligence. Making dangerous misrepresentations in order to sell books is intentional.
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