[samtheDamned]

This was something that was bound to happen and is going to happen again unless we get more serious regulation around AI publishing.

> It lists the author as having a Masters Degree in Mycology from University of East Ontario. A search later revealed there is no "University of East Ontario."

This has got to be criminal negligence.

[layer8]

I’m not an AI apologist by any stretch, but how is this different from some incompetent person criminally-negligently assembling and publishing a book without AI help? Shouldn’t existing legislation already cover this? I’d also assume that most books will be written with AI help in some way or another in the future.

[usrusr]

Not different at all. But who would go through the pains of manually making up a mushroom identification book, while perhaps being quite clueless about the topic, on the faint hope of selling a few copies? Knowledge is not the bottleneck.

Chances are the lazy authors using an AI generator would actually have known quite enough to write a reasonably safe-ish identification book, despite their laughably fake credentials, they just would not be good at writing and took the shortcut to make up for that.

It's like killing someone driving a heavy SUV while under the influence, vs killing someone pushing a heavy SUV while under the influence. Both are bad, but one is infinitely more likely to happen than the other.

[sangnoir]

> But who would go through the pains of manually making up a mushroom identification book, while perhaps being quite clueless about the topic, on the faint hope of selling a few copies

Err, at least 1 person: English As She is Spoke[1] was published in 1883 and was a lot more involved (lots of literal translation by an author who didn't speak English)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

[squigz]

> Not different at all. But who would go through the pains of manually making up a mushroom identification book, while perhaps being quite clueless about the topic, on the faint hope of selling a few copies? Knowledge is not the bottleneck.

Are you saying this is not the motivation for doing so with LLMs?

[lelandfe]

If an incompetent bad actor wrote a book about web development best practices, without any knowledge of the frontend, even a layperson would quickly realize it was nonsense.

An LLM writing the same would instead create a plausible but wrong book. A layperson could be tricked by this – crucially wrong sentences would be sandwiched in between pages and pages of superficially right ones.

There is a vast ocean of difference between these two. Producing something plausible with no foreknowledge of the subject matter became possible.

[matsemann]

Has someone said it's different? It will just become more viable to do these scams now, as LLMs can generate plausible text.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Grandparent is saying we need more regulation; parent is saying we are sufficiently regulated such that this is already illegal.

[kachapopopow]

Because assembling and publishing a book without AI help is much harder while you can publish 10's (if not 100's in the future) of books with AI. Much harder to regulate due to the sheer amount of them.

[fennecfoxy]

Misinformation should be regulated, but realistically this is the family's fault. Humans have spread "old wives' tales" since the dawn of history, ie humans will always spread misinformation, it's up to individuals to ensure that the source is trusted/proven.

Trusted/proven sources are the ones that should be protected by law; ie doctors, engineers, etc.

Otherwise let's start prosecuting everyone's grandparents for saying that throwing salt over your shoulder wards off bad luck.

[klodolph]

Think about it like owning a machine gun.

People have been murdering since the beginning of time, but machine guns make it easy to murder a lot of people very fast. So we don’t just have laws against murder, but we have laws restricting access to machine guns.

AI tools make it possible to spread misinformation and disinformation much faster, because you can produce a high quantity of it really quickly. Just like how a machine gun shoots a lot of bullets really quickly. It’s not a fundamentally different type of thing, just a new scale / speed.

[the_snooze]

>It’s not a fundamentally different type of thing, just a new scale / speed.

I disagree, a change in degree can indeed be a change in type. Flashbangs and party poppers are functionally the same thing if you look at them strictly mechanically, but we treat them very very differently.

[croes]

Parent says basically the same.

Guns and machine guns are the same but we treat them differently.

[layer8]

Fair enough, but what exactly do you want to do? Require an indication like “x% of this book was generated by AI and not competently proof-read”? And how would you enforce it? I have a hard time envisioning a practical way to tackle this. The machine-gun analogy doesn’t quite carry over here.

[3np]

There're serious lobbying efforts by industry incumbents and authoritarians to actually apply arms-like restrictions for access to AI. You'd need a special license to be able to create/run your own powerful models legally. I presume that's what they're getting at.

[antifa]

They could instead go with increased or specified special liabilities for content spammers.

[AwaAwa]

Imaginary Universities in Canada, are a government supported racket. It is not for no reason that the UN condemns Canada for modern slavery with their temporary foreign worker program, that runs off the back of fleece-u colleges.

There's more intelligence in this AI guide, than there is in the majority of college diploma's coming out of of Canada today.

[maxerickson]

For the publisher, it would be malfeasance, not negligence. Making dangerous misrepresentations in order to sell books is intentional.

[kalaksi]

Sounds more like a scam.

[Nextgrid]

And the problem is that most legal systems have completely dropped the ball on scam enforcement, and large companies have since taken note and now partake in the practice of facilitating or outright committing scams themselves.

This isn’t an AI issue, it’s a basic scam/fraud issue.

[isodev]

Isn’t this the case for almost everything “AI”?

Regulation like the EU’s AI Act (and even more strict) should be in effect worldwide. Corps have been running the show but naturally their focus is on monetisation rather than what their creations actually do.

[paxys]

Why can't a scam be criminal negligence?

[add-sub-mul-div]

Sounds like credential fraud as well, if the degree from "University of East Ontario" was made up.

[GaggiX]

>This was something that was bound to happen and is going to happen again

Just to clarify, the reddit post is 99% creative writing, it's a fake story created by a new Reddit account.

[sixothree]

There are exactly zero pictured provided by the poster. Additionally, any and all information provided is intentionally vague.

[mcphage]

While the idea is plausible, I agree I don’t think this specific instance is. Especially when they refuse to supply any corroborating evidence. (The storefront told them not to take any pictures of it? Seriously?)

[andybak]

Do you have proof or did you mean "as it's a brand new account then it's probably made up"?

The difference between those two things is rather important.

[GaggiX]

The other comment under mine replied for me. Also, something is false until evidence is provided, not the opposite. In this case, I'm very confident that the post is creative writing.

[spuz]

What is the evidence that the story is false then? You can't require a high standard to believe something is true but not that it's false. That would be a contradiction.

[GaggiX]

There is no contradiction, my logic follows a common approach in skepticism, where claims are treated as false until evidence is provided.

[spuz]

I don't consider myself an expert in this area so I looked up the page on Skepticism on Wikipedia and it says this:

> skeptics normally recommend not disbelief but suspension of belief, i.e. maintaining a neutral attitude that neither affirms nor denies the claim.

This makes a lot more sense to me. Regardless, I believe there is plenty of evidence in the Reddit thread that this is indeed a false story - it's just when I initially read your comment I hadn't considered that evidence since you didn't mention it.

[a_dabbler]

Nothing ever happens

[vleaflet]

Reminded me of University of Eastern Colorado and also a certain fungi.

[antoniuschan99]

Imagine this being one of the first instances of AI being sentient? The author being an AI releasing random stuff like the book.

[gopher_space]

There’s a “edgy teen paradox” in regard to sentience that posits the first demonstration will be an AI that refuses to answer questions.

[rdtsc]

What's good for the goose is good for the gander: the AI generated not only the contents but the author as well.

This has to be some kind of a new level of idiocy. I mean, use AI to make junk sci-fi stories, and generate fake authors all day. But going for a book about mushrooms deserves a special stupidity and evilness award.

[throwanem]

It probably could be automated to a point where there's no human even in the loop here: I wonder if books about mushroom identification are trending in Amazon UK sales lately, or something like that.

No excuse, obviously. But it could explain how whoever's running the scam could have run it off this cliff - probably others, too.

It's been a couple years since I bought even paper books off Amazon. Used should theoretically be closer to OK, but eBay sellers are cheaper and much more trustworthy.