💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 11-02.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Effluent and Pennies: The Amazon AI Flood
Mushroom foragers urged to avoid books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI
Feels like I just wrote about this, because I did. Last month, there were articles warning about the scam that is AI-generated travel books on Amazon; not even a month later, it seems the worst people in the world have upped their game, this time flooding that platform with books on mushroom foraging.
This is reprehensible. People should be held to account. People are going to die.
Call me old fashioned, but mushroom foraging isn't something I'm particularly interested in. It was impressed on me by my parents very early on that mushrooms can be deadly, that something can look good and it won't be, that you have to be very, very knowledgable, and even then, you could mess up, and make yourself sick, or worse.
Growing up on the west coast, I saw all kinds of stuff grow wild, and every year, like clockwork, there would be articles in the paper. Newcomers from cultures where foraging is more prevalent, children who saw a mushroom and decided to eat it, that sort of thing. The warning often that deathcaps were picked, mistaken for puffballs and others.
And I never really liked mushrooms growing up, so why risk it for something I'm not even that fond of?
But a lot of people seem to be into foraging these days. One of our friends, ten years younger than us, is very into Instagram, and followers local foragers who gather morels. She complains about how expensive they are, huge amounts of money for a small container. She buys them anyway. I find it appalling, but hold my tongue: not the price, but the fact that you'd buy a container of unknown mushrooms from someone purely because they posted a pretty picture online and it got selected into your feed.
What kind of credentials do they have? Do they follow strict provincial health standards around food handling?
Yeah, I thought so.
As before, as with the glut of false travel guides, the Amazon scammers who put up AI-generated books aren't trying to catch everyone, because they don't have to. With Amazon just taking a cut of every copy's sales, there's no upfront risk to the scammers. They can just fill the marketplace will all sorts of garbage, hoping to sell a handful of copies of each, split the profits with Amazon.
And so now there are books on how to forage for mushrooms on that platform, that haven't been checked by any sort of authority, that feature, I'm sure, authors with stolen or made-up names. And somewhere out there, people are going to forage based off what they read in them, and some number of them will screw up, and get sick, or worse.
In the same way that building codes expand because of the ways in which people die, and their deaths become lessons, I think we're going to see a tightening of laws in the coming years. Not that any of this will become outright illegal; I expect a similar flood of, say, colouring books. Pour one out for all the artists whose careers are being sabotaged or shortened by technology that has been trained without permission on a massive dataset of copyrighted work. No, I expect we'll see platforms and stores start to be liable in some sense for what they carry; the claim that they're simply providing a marketplace will be tested, strenuously.
Or maybe that'll be fine. Maybe all sellers will need to be registered businesses. But something's going to change, and based on how we as a society work, it'll probably take people dying to trigger it. Personally, I've started moving of Amazon where I can. But for other people, it remains essential. Everything you could want is there. And Prime is a hell of a drug. So they order all kinds of stuff. Packing tape. Tomato sauce for later this week. Melatonin gummies. And maybe a book on mushroom foraging? I saw something show up on Instagram earlier. There are so many books on this! I'd like to give it a try.