Mushroom books written by AI still unable to spot toxic species

2023-08-30 16:26:30

If the consumption of wild-picked mushrooms is not without danger when one does not know about it, it can be even more so when one uses erroneous information to identify the edible species or not. This sound advice can be found in books on mushrooms written by artificial intelligence (AI) like Chat GPT, explains 404 Mediamardi.

: PSA Alert!
: link in bio@Amazon and other retail outlets have been inundated with AI foraging and identification books.

Please only buy books of known authors and foragers, it can literally mean life or death. pic.twitter.com/FSqQLDhh42

— newyorkmyc (@newyorkmyc) August 27, 2023

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Several mushroom experts have alerted to the presence of such works for sale on Amazon. The Mycological Society of New York (United States) thus announced that it had discovered this type of book on the online sales platform, but that nothing specified that they had been written by AI. Thanks to digital tools, specialists have spotted passages written by chatbots and even fake photos of mushrooms created by image generators.

“A matter of life or death”

The Mycological Society estimated that artificial intelligences were in fact unable to recognize a poisonous mushroom from an edible mushroom. The fault is the often misleading resemblance that can exist between one and the other. “Please only buy books from known authors and collectors, it’s literally a matter of life and death,” the experts recommended on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday.

For its part, Amazon announced that it had already withdrawn several of these books. “We invest significant time and resources to ensure compliance with our guidelines and remove books that do not [les] respect,” the company commented. In order to identify a mushroom picked in the forest and to assess its possible toxicity, the best solution is to show it to a pharmacist or a mycologist. In France, the Mycological Society also offers a list of toxic and edible mushrooms on its website.