Amateur mushroom pickers have been urged to avoid foraging books sold on Amazon that appear to have been written by artificial intelligence chatbots.
Amazon has become a marketplace for AI-produced tomes that are being passed off as having been written by humans, with travel books among the popular categories for fake work.
Now 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. The titles include “Wild Mushroom Cookbook: form [sic] forest to gourmet plate, a complete guide to wild mushroom cookery” and “The Supreme Mushrooms Books Field Guide of the South-West”.
The way publishing works, it is easy for Amazon to just check who is responsible for those books. Odd that they are not, I thought the US was a more litigious place.
Thats honestly not as true as some would have you believe. I think it stems from a case where a woman got third degree burns on her legs when a cup of mcdonalds coffee from a drive thru spilled. the company called the case supurflous, and used its vast megaphone to paint the woman as the one who was at fault. it worked. as a pre-teen I recall other kids talking with assurity about how the woman who spilled her coffee was absuing the system- coffee is hot! americans will sue over anything! The woman needed skin grafts and settled for 20k. ABC news called it “the poster child of frivilous lawsuits”.
I moved to Ireland in 2007. Insurance here is shockingly high- if you get in a car accident, the chances people put in “a claim” are HIGH. The bass player of a band I was in here had a €3,500 bass and didn’t work at age 29. He tripped on a paving stone while running downhill on a sidewalk/footpath and sued the farmer who lived next to it. The house I’m living in now has an extention that the previous owner was able to put on with money from “her claim”. Not sure what happened, but she worked for an insurance company. She’s living on an island and “is an artist” now. My friend visiting from the US backed into a car and dented the door panel. When she went to talk to the car’s owner’s, the wife of the family went out and got into the car and said she was in it when they hit the car and her neck hurt and needed to go to the hospital. There were 7 of us there, inculding the irish home owners of the house we were staying in and the cop believed us over her.
These are anticdotal stories from my personal experience here in Ireland. There used to be an Oktoberfest event down on the water on the docklands, it was nice. I asked one of the organizers a year or so ago why they stopped and they said “they were losing money because of the insurance premiums”. My car insurance here first year was €1600 annually, when it was $185 annually in the US (2006 or so).
I lived in the US a lot longer than I’ve lived here, and I never knew anyone who sued anyone else there.
To back up your point but also clarify, the woman with the McDonald’s coffee initially offered to settled for 20k, but McDonald’s wouldn’t offer more than $800. The jury awarded her $3mil. It was later reduced but then settled confidentially. McDonald’s did (as you point out) produce a major smear campaign against her and completely downplayed her injuries. iirc, her the injuries included third degree burns, fusion of labia to her thigh, and multiple skin grafts. The more you learn about it, the worse it gets. We were all brainwashed into thinking it was poster child for frivolous lawsuits. https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts
Yeah, thanks for that. Especially having me thinking about labia being fused to the thigh first thing in the morning. Hello, sunday!
Rich people have better lawyers, though.
People who are foraging the woods for mushrooms aren’t exactly the same who can afford high prices lawyers.
Personal injury lawyers will work on commission for things like this.