AI Is Writing Books About Foraging. What Could Go Wrong?
OctoberO October 10, 2023 | Source: Civil Eats | by Claudia Geib
Like mushrooms after an autumn rain, a new flush of books have popped up on Amazon that claim to provide everything you need to forage your next meal from local parks and woodlands—an increasingly popular hobby in the wake of the pandemic. The books appear to part of a large new wave of books that are being assembled and “published” using artificial intelligence (AI). And experts are concerned that some of them may give misleading, even dangerous, information to novice foragers.
Chef and forager Alan Bergo says he first heard about the books from a worried Facebook post by John Kallas, a fellow forager and author, who runs Wild Food Adventures in Portland, Oregon. Kallas wrote, “We are in a new era of scams,” calling the books a “disturbing trend” and the product of people “that don’t give a hoot about wild foods, don’t know wild foods, and want to drain you of your money.”
But Bergo didn’t think much of this complaint until he was reviewing a manuscript for a new foraging book and saw that the author had referenced a book that he knew from Kallas was “plagiarized blatantly” from the work of fellow forager Sam Thayer.
“I was just incensed, and it was on from there,” Bergo says. The reference was a wake-up call, he says, that “this is way more of a pervasive problem than I had imagined, and we need to squash this right now.”