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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

#71

Post by culebron21 »

mcbuilder wrote: post #29
rnhmjoj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also a problem with accurate images and descriptions. Some mushrooms are very easily mistaken for others: unless you're 100% sure you've picked this very species before in around the same place and time, you'd better leave it there or bring it to a mycologist for identification.

I agree, I always thought eating mushrooms required an expert for confirmation, otherwise you are rolling the dice. Buying a random book off Amazon and using that seems like the very definition of something a non-expert would do.

You simply steer away from those that are easy to misidentify. There aren't that many species in any given area, and those that look like poisonous are few, and well known.

In my childhood, when we lived in real suburbia, with woods in 5 minutes of walk or right at the door, we routinely gathered mushrooms, and never had a problem.

We stopped it when we moved to other places, or probably because adolescence came around -- probably, parents had taken us for an interesting kind of walk, and then we'd not want it anymore.

Right now I can only recall some names of mushrooms and only sure of one species, so I won't risk at all.

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

#72

Post by gopher_space »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #55
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.

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

There’s a “edgy teen paradox” in regard to sentience that posits the first demonstration will be an AI that refuses to answer questions.

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

#74

Post by matsemann »

layer8 wrote: post #34
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.

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.

Has someone said it's different? It will just become more viable to do these scams now, as LLMs can generate plausible text.

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

#75

Post by joe_the_user »

Tagbert wrote: post #19

I see this happen a lot on Tiktok and Facebook where influencers post about using different plants for food or for skincare. They often either show photos that are of a different plant that is dangerous to eat or they haven’t actually tried this and promoting the consumption of a plant that can poison people. It’s the Wild West out there on social networks.

This feels just because while people who know just bit about plants might do some dumb things, mushrooms are a thing that anyone who knows a bit about plants knows not to screw with because it's easy to poison oneself and the results are horrible.

My father was a moderately known evolutionary biologist and he advised his students encountering an unknown plant and curious whether it was edible to "try it and see". But this was for a flowering plant. Most mushrooms can't be dealt with that way.

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

#76

Post by usrusr »

layer8 wrote: post #34
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.

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 credentials, they just would not be good at writing and took the shortcut to make up for that.

It's like killing someone driving a heavy SUV while under the influence, vs killing someone pushing a heavy SUV while under the influence. Both are bad, but one is infinitely more likely to happen than the other.

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

#77

Post by madaxe_again »

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.

The bit where they say Amazon demanded that they return the book by special delivery or face having their entire Amazon account terminated is where the point at which it became clear to me that this is ragebait - Amazon simply do not work that way in the U.K. - returns are via prepaid label that they provide, and they don’t terminate your account if you fail to return a product, you just don’t get refunded.

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

#78

Post by SkyPuncher »

CM30 wrote: post #10

This is why generative AI simply doesn't work for anything with actual consequences. As it is right now, it's a glorified autocomplete, and one that doesn't understand the context it's being used in at all. That's fine for things like stock images or text on random product pages, but for things like this? Yeah, the very concept is just risky as hell.

Search also doesn’t work for anything with actual consequences by this logic.

You verify information by finding multiple, different sources.

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

matsemann wrote: post #74
layer8 wrote: 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.

Has someone said it's different? It will just become more viable to do these scams now, as LLMs can generate plausible text.

[deleted]
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