DANGEROUS MUSHROOMS
2023
Generative AI led to a flood of books on Amazon. Thousands of titles began to saturate every imaginable niche. The mushroom foraging guides promised to help beginners identify edible fungi in the wild, using authoritative titles and professional-looking covers.
The problem? AI models don’t actually know anything about mushrooms, and they hallucinate. These books were riddled with dangerous advice, such as identifying mushrooms by taste (a potentially fatal mistake). Other books paired photos of deadly species with descriptions of delicious, edible ones. A guide for Canadian foragers confidently recommended a lethal mushroom as safe for a family dinner.
Amazon eventually began removing some of the books after public outcry, but they still list far too many AI-slop books