AI shows there’s still money to be made in killing people.
Ok, what’s AI ruining now?
Books. Mushrooms. People’s heads.
Some one thing that Chat GPT has enabled is a whole heap of AI generated books.
Chat GPT can do you a 50 word social media post. It can do a chapter plan for a book. It can do the book itself.
That’s pretty marvellous.
But people are people. And if you give people a tool that allows people to pump out books with the click of a button, people are going to try to make money out of it.
And that’s not too bad. Mostly the stuff Chat GPT generates is pretty middle of the road and harmless enough.
And if you’re tackling harmless topics – “Knitting and Crotchet for fun and profit” – what can really go wrong?
But what if you’re dishing out medical advice? Or nutritional advice? Or both.
What if you’re telling people what mushrooms they can and can not eat?
Yep. Somebody went there. Somebody decided that Chat GPT knows how to tell the difference between edible and poisonous mushroom. It doesn’t.
And the New York Mycological Society (NYMS) has had a look at the books and reckons it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets killed.
To be fair, the books themselves do raise some red-flags.
Like, The Ultimate Mushroom Books Field Guide Of The Southwest: An essential field guide to foraging edible and non-edible mushrooms outdoors and indoors.
Who on earth is foraging for mushrooms indoors?
Or what about WILD MUSHROOM COOKBOOK FOR BEGINNER: The complete guide on mushroom foraging and cooking with delicious recipes to enjoy your favorite.
Can’t wait to get home to enjoy my favourite.
And when you look into the authors, they don’t pass the laugh test. Magerete Lawrence, who published the cookbook, has no online presence and has written 20 books in the last two months!
Banging them out Magerte. If that is your real name.
So there’s red flags there, but we are primed to believe anything we believe in books.
There used to be some many checks and balances, so many hurdles to clear before you could get anything published in book-form.
‘Book’ used to be its own credibility system.
Not anymore.
And this is what a lot of people worry about when it comes to AI – that we end up in a BS death loop.
Its easy to imagine that Edwin J Smiths, Psilocybin Mushroom Book: Field Guide To Identification, Growing, and Microdosing Psilocybin Mushroom for Safe Use and Health Remedies, becomes the standard reference text.
Its completely AI-generated, but the bots scraping the internet don’t know that.
And so “Eat shrooms until your face feels funny. That’s how you know they’re working,” gets reproduced over and over and over.
And humanity and actual knowledge gets swamped in a tidal wave of B.S.
Rather than democratising knowledge, it destroys it.
And then if you want to know something, you have to physically find someone who knows and ask them.
Back to the future.
JG.