Amateur mushroom pickers have been urged to avoid foraging books sold onAmazon has become a marketplace for AI-produced tomes that are being passed off as having been written by humans, with travel booksNow a number of books have appeared on the online retailer’s site offering guides to wild mushroom foraging that also seem to be written by chatbots.
Four samples from the books were examined for the Guardian by originality.ai, a US firm that detects AI content.
The other books tested by originality.ai were “Wild Mushroom Cookbook: A beginner’s guide to learning the basics of cooking with wild mushrooms for health and flavor, complete with easy-to-follow recipes!” and “Wild Mushroom Cookbook: unlock the delicious secrets of nature’s most flavorful fungi”. The Guardian has attempted to contact the authors named on the books.
Leon Frey, a foraging guide and field mycologist at Cornwall-based Family Foraging Kitchen, which organises foraging field trips, said the samples he had seen contained serious flaws such as referring to “smell and taste” as an identifying feature. “This seems to encourage tasting as a method of identification. This should absolutely not be the case,” he said. One book refers to the Lion’s Mane fungus, which is edible, but is a protected species in the UK and should not be picked.