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'Life Or Death:' AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon (404media.co) 75

samleecole writes: A genre of AI-generated books on Amazon is scaring foragers and mycologists: cookbooks and identification guides for mushrooms aimed at beginners.

Amazon has an AI-generated books problem that's been documented by journalists for months. Many of these books are obviously gibberish designed to make money. But experts say that AI-generated foraging books, specifically, could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe.

The New York Mycological Society (NYMS) warned on social media that the proliferation of AI-generated foraging books could "mean life or death."

A quick scan of Amazon's mushroom and foraging books revealed a bunch of books likely written by ChatGPT, but are sold without any indication that they're AI-generated and are marketed as having been written by a human when they're probably not. 404 Media used GPT text detectors and AI image detection tools on some of the suspicious books, and found that they were very likely made with AI, with authors who may not even exist.

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'Life Or Death:' AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon

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  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @11:04AM (#63806116) Homepage Journal

    If consumers feel that Amazon is just a clearinghouse for AI generated garbage then people will stop showing up to buy stuff. It's up to Amazon to start regulating this on their own site, because the government isn't going to get around to protecting consumers.

    • OK (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Amazon's likely solution - it no longer sells self-published books. Happy? I am sure that the sales of self-published books on Amazon is not even a fraction of a percent; it's almost an act of charity that it bothers to sell these books.

      I don't give two shits about who darwinizes himself; the fact that we can buy self-published biographies by minor figures who are nevertheless important to small groups of people (e.g., the showrunner of 1980s TV show The Smurfs) is fucking amazing.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by nukenerd ( 172703 )

        Amazon's likely solution - it no longer sells self-published books. Happy?

        Absolutely.

      • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

        Stop being a pussy and post with your real account.

      • Re:OK (Score:4, Informative)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @01:42PM (#63806712)

        Are you sure about that?

        I know several authors - authors who do quite well, making a full living off their books, and have good rankings on Amazon and a couple best sellers - who "sell" a lot of self-published books.

        They're all fiction, and a part of the Kindle Unlimited, so we're not talking about the same thing exactly. But it's not an unobtainable living, or that rare. Eg. a lot of authors who'd have historically been vying for publishing through Baen no longer have to.

    • Only ~10% of Amazon's revenue is from book sales. They could stop selling them entirely and it wouldn't hurt very much.

      =Smidge=

      • by ranton ( 36917 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @11:59AM (#63806308)

        You think any company losing 10% of its revenue wouldn't hurt very much? In Amazon's case that is about $50 billion per year in revenue. That would sting quite a lot.

        • That's about 1/5th of the profit from 2022. Oh boo hoo they'd only make $200B in profit from everything else. Poor babies. How could they possible afford to pay their workers starvation wages then?

          No, ditching their entire book selling business would not hurt them very much. Of course that's never going to happen either; someone else suggested maybe they just end self-published services. If there's any major change in publishing rules, though, I'd figure Amazon would create their own publishing company to m

          • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @01:49PM (#63806742)

            That's short-horizon thinking.

            While only 10% of their revenue is from books, I'd wager a significantly larger number of total sales are from books - whether from 0.99 Kindle books, or from the "pages read" of Kindle Unlimited.

            I've got friends who read -thousands- of books a year. Voracious speed readers. (Apparently there's an award given to people who surpass a certain number of books read - one of these friends got it.)

            Those pages/sales are all impressions: they're eyes and attention spent on the platform, bringing in (some) revenue both directly (book sales, Kindle Unlimited) and indirectly through ad revenue, impulse purchases while on platform, and people generally prioritizing Amazon for purchases of books and other materials.

            Getting rid of self-published books would completely eviscerate Kindle Unlimited, specifically, Kindle sales more generally (because people would be less likely to be reading dozens of cheap books a week). I'd argue that these are also the most loyal Amazon customers (with multiple Kindles and multiple Kindle-related value-added services), and you'd see a significant impact across multiple properties as a result.

        • by cshamis ( 854596 )
          You think being charged with Murder-2 isn't a deterrent? There're no statue of limitations on murder. They WILL come for you. And selling a stupid book and tracing it back backwards through publishers, would take state police or FBI about two days.
      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @01:32PM (#63806682)
        to a corporation. Their shareholders would eat them alive. That said, I seriously doubt any of this matters. It's safe to say these "self published" book are just a little extra cash, and not a significant portion of that 10%.

        I mean the stuff that isn't by Chuck Tingle, which makes up approximately 8% of Amazon's revenue by my calculations.
      • Amazon's book business model is a bit like a convenience store that sells gas/petrol. The money is in the drinks and snacks and not the razor thin margins of being a penny cheaper than the nearest station.

        People show up to amazon to buy a book, audio book, or ebook. And the site itself recommends shoes, movies, and backpacks to go along with your purchase. It's an effective strategy to be able to sell everything to everyone.

        Also, I don't know too many successful businesses that throw away 10% of their reven

    • > AI-generated foraging books, specifically, could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom

      Maybe this is Sky-Net's first strike on humans.

    • If consumers feel that Amazon is just a clearinghouse for AI generated garbage then people will stop showing up to buy stuff.

      The last time you could impact Amazon with mere books, was last century.

      Literally.

      • by ranton ( 36917 )

        The last time you could impact Amazon with mere books, was last century.

        Literally.

        In 2001 Amazon's domestic sales were $1.7 billion in books/movies/cds, $547 million in other retail, and $225 million in services. So there was certainly a time this century when book sales were a very high percentage of the company's total sales.

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          You mentioned books, movies, and cds as one category. There's no particular reason to think that books was a large fraction of that category, as, IIUC, movies are more expensive and a lot more people view them.

          • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

            I think movies and books cost about the same. The real issue is that Amazon discounts both categories so deeply that their margins must be next to nothing. (The cited figure was sales, not profits.)

            • Virtual shelves stocked with AI generated movies and music aren't far down the road. AI is going to accidentally break capitalism when it destroys major consumer markets.

      • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        Nah. Amazon now sells more books than the entire book industry did in the prior century - in absolute numbers, annually. Without Amazon at this point, there would effectively be no book publishing industry - they're over 60% of global book sales IIRC.

    • by UPi ( 137083 )
      No, it is OUR survival. This is the second time an AI has attempted to murder humans that I know of. :) (Amazon, on the other hand, will be fine.)
      • Yes, but in this case they will only remove people who trust their lives to information acquired from random books bought online. So perhaps, because we are trying to make AI smarter, AI is just doing what it can to help the process by making humans smarter...although if so it is taking a very long-game approach.
      • by znrt ( 2424692 )

        it wasn't ai. it was a senseless scammer using ai.

        besides, someone dying to poisonous mushrooms because of foraging with some random book as sole and only reference hardly qualifies as murder, it's more like natural selection doing its thing, much like people falling to their deaths from cliffs for an instagram selfie or just pool diving from balconies. we don't accuse cliffs or balconies of murder, we accept such embarrassing behavior as a fate of life.

        furthermore, that mushroom book was written by an ai b

    • by jonadab ( 583620 )
      Realistically, the only way they're going to be able to keep out the AI generated garbage, is to stop listing self-published titles. They don't want to do that, because there is money to be made charging naive aspiring authors money for the twenty or so print-on-demand copies they want so they can make misguided attempts to get them into libraries and bookstores on the theory that this might somehow magically result in people reading them.

      It's a very exploitative practice, but the victims pretty much never
    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Doubt it.

      Face it, most of the AI garbage is only available in e-book form, because no publisher is going to commit to publishing it, and a vanity press costs money. But e-books are trivial to get on Amazon since you just need some free software and you can generate tons of the garbage.

      Amazon is allowing the crap because it lets them have books on their Netflix style service where you get to read all the books you want from a pool of books for free.

      So at the very worst, it's just going to get people to not s

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      If consumers feel that Amazon is just a clearinghouse for AI generated garbage then people will stop showing up to buy stuff.

      What part of the history of American consumerism makes you think this is remotely true? Do you really think that... *sniff*, brb my Amazon purchased ultra cheap Chinese e-bike battery just caught fire.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

        Hey guys anyone know why this super discounted Amazon bought fire extinguisher doesn't work?

    • If consumers feel that Amazon is just a clearinghouse for AI generated garbage then people will stop showing up to buy stuff. It's up to Amazon to start regulating this on their own site, because the government isn't going to get around to protecting consumers.

      If people start dying because they trusted an AI generated book they bought on Amazon then Amazon should be looking at a major lawsuit. Not to mention a pretty decent dent in their sales.

      Given the revenue that Amazon pulls in they should be able to do some minimal quality control on this stuff.

  • ChatLSD (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @11:14AM (#63806150) Journal

    If you are on mushrooms, the AI stuff will sound perfectly normal.

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @11:20AM (#63806172)

    I would say that of mistakes in there kill anybody (and it likely will), the responsible authors (i.e. those the money goes to) should go away for criminally negligent homicide. Obviously, they will be on the hook for medical bills and lost wages caused by mistakes as well.

    • Nope. Let nature take its course. There are a multitude of other sources which reliably identify mushrooms which can be used in cooking. They've been around for over 100 hundred years.

      If people are too stupid to do due diligence, such is life.

      • by XanC ( 644172 )

        They've been around for ten thousand years?

      • Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @11:44AM (#63806242) Homepage

        I like letting fools suffer the consequences of their foolishness as much as the next guy, but "let nature take its course" is literally the opposite of what civilization is about.

        Did you test your breakfast for salmonella and botulism before you ate it? Probably not, because running lab tests before every meal would be an expensive pain in the ass, which is why we have laws to make sure that only safe products are sold; that way we can just take food out of the fridge and eat it without randomly dying from food poisoning.

        I think the same product-safety rules ought to apply to how-to guides being sold online.

        • Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @12:47PM (#63806530)

          I like letting fools suffer the consequences of their foolishness as much as the next guy, but "let nature take its course" is literally the opposite of what civilization is about.

          Indeed. Society only works if you can trust most of the elements/services/goods/information and getting killed or harmed in surprising ways by mechanisms of society is very rare. That is the very point of societies, cutting out the need for expert-level due diligence in standard situations and thereby massively increase efficiency and allowing non-experts to use equipment that otherwise would be experts-only. For example, you do not need to expect electrical equipment to kill you and there is no need to use an isolation-tester first or disassemble and analyse the circuitry. (As a side-note, when ordering electrical equipment on AliExpress, you do need to be an expert. You _can_ get good quality mains-operated equipment, but also outright dangerous equipment. But the same does not apply at your local shopping center or somebody there will get liable.) Hence people use electrical equipment without thinking twice and as a result the efficiency gains and possibilities benefit everybody and society as a whole.

          One element of that is that books that document dangers for novices and explain how to do things right are reliable and there is somebody being held responsible if the advice given is dangerously bad and the book gets retracted. Sure, there are limits. A book advocating homeopathy should probably get pulled, but unless they advocate not consulting actual medical professionals in actual emergencies, they are pretty much in the clear. Of course, anybody somewhat smart knows to stay away from homeopathy, so there is that.

          Hence in the case at hand, anybody buying such a book has a reasonable expectation of its advice not getting them killed. And if that is violated, the constraints a society works under are violated and corrective action is needed.

          • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            TL:DR if you are wrong and I don't like what you had to say - you're bad. If you are wrong and I agree, "get vaxxed so we can go back to normal" I'll make excuses for you all day long.

            People need to learn to evaluate sources. Random book from Amazon published last year - probably not something you want to chance your life on, eating random stuff in the woods. Survival guide that has been in print 60 years - probably solid content. CDC that pulls adverse reaction from their web site - you decide...

            • Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

              by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @01:23PM (#63806654)

              You completely miss the point. No surprise, really.

              This is not about new or not well-understood things. Books on mushroom foraging get new releases all the time, with prettier pictures, web-references and whatnot, but the basic subject and type of book and _content_ is centuries old and nothing has fundamentally changed in the subject area. Under those conditions you have a reasonable expectation of accuracy, regardless of who published. That is what society is about.

            • The point is how do you evaluate the source, I don't know how? Well in any area that I am not an expert in. If I find some medical treatment on the internet how am I meant to know that its Ok or not without doing a medical degree, and then how do I know that course is not nonsense? Well I generally ask an expert, but if you say these people who proclaim they are experts can lie without consequence, then how can I trust them.

              As for books on mushroom gathering, if people stopped buying new books why wouldn't

              • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                Once you allow people do deceive without consequence then everything becomes very hard, very quickly,

                Indeed. And that is the essence of it. Once getting screwed over becomes too likely, trust erodes and society crumbles, to the detriment of everybody.

        • Mushroom info (Score:4, Informative)

          by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @01:08PM (#63806608) Homepage Journal

          I like letting fools suffer the consequences of their foolishness as much as the next guy, but "let nature take its course" is literally the opposite of what civilization is about.

          Here in the US we get one or two mushroom poisonings every 5 years or so. Country wide.

          There's a specific type of poisonous mushroom called the "death cap" (Amanita phalloides [wikipedia.org]) that looks exactly like an edible mushroom that's common in southeast Asia and is frequently hunted/picked by the locals there.

          What typically happens is someone from that area comes over to visit relatives in the US, goes out to pick mushrooms, sees the death cap and thinks it's edible, and a tragedy ensues.

          As part of survival training, it was explained to me that the American Indians would eat anything but they wouldn't eat mushrooms because even they couldn't tell which were edible and which were poisonous. The work of Paul Stamets [wikipedia.org] is an interesting follow.

          A red mushroom with white spots that you eat in the Mario games is amanita muscaria [duckduckgo.com], also called "fly agaric" because you soak the mushroom in milk and then flies land on the milk and die. It's also poisonous, and note that it shares the "amanita" name with the death cap.

          Amanita mushrooms are very common. If you see a mushroom of one color with different colored spots, it's probably an amanita and poisonous. Where I live we have a variant that's yellow (not red) with white spots (var saracens, IIRC), although I've just this year seen an orange-tending-to-red with white spots that I think is closer to the Mario variant.

          So basically, stay away from anything that has spots as a first rule. A better rule is don't hunt mushrooms unless you are under the tutelage of someone who is an expert and can show you the differences.

          I won't eat wild mushrooms at all, because it's entirely possible for a professional mushroom hunter to make a mistake, and a mushroom mistake can damage and even kill your liver. Better to order them online and grow known variants, or (even better) get them from the supermarket.

          (Apropos of nothing, there's a walkway next to the local police station where I live that goes near an old stump, and the mushrooms that grow there are almost certainly psilocybin. Next to a police station. In a small NH town.)

          (There are fungi that have different forms from the common mushroom, such as flutes, puffballs, morels, and coral fungus. These are less dangerous because there are no poisonous variants and it's much easier to tell them apart.)

          • by Strider- ( 39683 )

            (There are fungi that have different forms from the common mushroom, such as flutes, puffballs, morels, and coral fungus. These are less dangerous because there are no poisonous variants and it's much easier to tell them apart.)

            I was reading your comment and was just about to say that I agree with you, with the exception of certain mushrooms like Morels and Chanterelles which are unique and don't have toxic lookalikes in the same regions. There is the "False Morel" which turns into toxic rocket fuel (mono-methyl hydrazine) if consumed raw, but it's pretty easy to spot the difference if you're even mildly observant.

          • Better to order them online and grow known variants

            What if your online supplier is Amazon?

    • Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Visarga ( 1071662 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @11:32AM (#63806202)
      Is there no way to sue the authors for public endangerment? At the very least a big disclaimer with "AI generated content, could contain text hallucinations, use at your own risk" is due to be slapped on these books.
      • Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @12:48PM (#63806540)

        With the disclaimer, it will probably hard to sue. But if it is missing or hidden somewhere or, worse, the book claims to have been written by an expert, this could well go into criminal liability if somebody gets hurt or killed.

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      You can just put them in fiction or put in a disclaimer. Whoever thinks a random book on mycology is trustworthy is an idiot, so says every random book on mycology. Mushrooms you find in Northern America can look the same as the ones found in Europe but have wildly different effects/edibility.

    • by imidan ( 559239 )
      Not a bad idea, until the "author" of the book turns out to be a faceless foreign corporation that vanishes out of existence overnight, reincorporating almost immediately under a different name. They already do exactly that for reasons far less serious than killing people.
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        There is a money flow. If law-enforcement is seriously and not doing their usual crap of pretending to work and terrorizing citizens they think cannot fight back, then it is absolutely no problem to find out who is behind. Amazon does not do anonymous payments to sellers and is actually not allowed to.

        • by imidan ( 559239 )
          No, but the international aspect combined with the limited cooperation of foreign governments makes for a significant challenge. You're certainly right, that such perpetrators are theoretically prosecutable, but in practice it seems to be much more difficult.
  • Granted, the AI books are dangerous. However, any mshroom book should emphasize having an expert check your harvest. Since the AI books presumably derive from genuine books and articles - do they say this also?
  • Nowadays it’s very out-of-style to listen to actual experts. In this particular case, the problem will fix itself.
  • It won't go rogue, because it will never get to that point. It will be idiots following the output of the plagiarism generators because they think it is showering them with knowledge, when really it's just spewing liquid bovine excrement.

  • by PJ6 ( 1151747 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @12:34PM (#63806478)
    The best scenario would be to make Amazon automatically liable for damages from the products they sell, and have it incumbent on them to recover that cost, when possible, through civil litigation.

    That way the whodunnit part isn't left on the doorstep of the injured party, or the relevant regulatory agencies. It becomes Amazon's problem, and the cost of that is factored into their policies and the cost of the products.
    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      That's an excellent idea. It's even better because Amazon has a business presence wherever they sell and deliver products, while the author probably doesn't. So you'd need to prosecute the author in a federal court...and good luck with that. (Or possibly make an international case out of it.)

    • This is the way.

  • These books may well be written by AI, but the detectors have about the same accuracy as a coin flip. They usually work by passing text to a LLM, and asking if a LLM generated the text
  • by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @01:00PM (#63806574)

    some are just edible once.

    And here I was worried about doom robots, and AI will kill us off with poison mushrooms.

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @01:05PM (#63806596)
    when AI starts generating fake people with fake histories in official databases, to write fake books with fake publication dates. The public record will dissolve into an acid-bath of dyamically-generated lies. Unless of course governments miraculously start holding the companies that do this shit accountable.
  • Thought it was about a mushroom overtaking the Amazon forrest
  • AI is not generating these books unprompted, much less offering them for sale. This is being done by real, criminally negligent people.

  • Isn't this just part of human evolution?

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