When Donovan Thieson found a new book on fungal collection in Saskatchewan, he did not anticipate having to warn the people who do not read it.
Thioson, an avid expert in Forazadores and Fungi from Meadow Lake, directs a Facebook group on fungal collection. At the end of last month, one of its users alerted him to a new book that was sold on Amazon, Saskatchewan’s edible wild lots.
After reading only a few paragraphs in the book, Thieson was alarmed.
“It’s absolutely terrible and inaccurate,” he said. “First, he lacks chapter 7. There are fungi with the wrong photos, and there are great inaccuracies about the edibility of certain fungi.
“To say that you can eat wild fungi in Saskatchewan ignores the fact that there is a good number that will kill you.”
Thieson says he immediately suspected that the book was generated by AI.
The CBC collaborated with Originality.AIAn Ontario -based company that detects content produced by AI to prove Thiesson’s theory. A sample of the conclusion of the book obtained 100 percent in the site’s detector.
The author of the book, Victor Howard, was selling another fungal selection book only digital at Amazon, Edible and medicinal plants for the elderly [sic]. Both have been eliminated from the site, but can be found under the author of the author Good profile.
The books were self -edited and there was no other information about Howard available on any of the websites.
According to Amazon guidelines, the content generated by AI, such as books and works of art, can be sold whenever the seller reveals that fact to buyers. However, it leaves the verification to its customers.
In a statement, Amazon spokesman Tim Gillman said the site is proactive to find people who break their rules.
“We invest significant time and resources to ensure that our guidelines are followed, and eliminate books that do not adhere to those guidelines,” he said.
More books generated by AI that appear online
Jonathan Degen, the CEO of the Union of Writers of Canada, says that it is seeing that more and more books generated by AI appear online.
“It highlights the type of extreme problem that we are dealing with at this time in terms of controlling intellectual property within our writing and editorial industry,” he said.
“We have always seen false books,” said Degen, referring to previous scam practices that copy pages of Wikipedia of famous figures and selling them as unauthorized biographies. “Now, I guess they don’t have to go to a wikipedia page to take all that content. They can create the content themselves.”
Some organizations are fighting.
In January, the American Writers Guild launched a “human” certification that the authors can use in their books and marketing materials to verify their human origins.
“The human initiative is to reject technology: it is about creating transparency, recognizing the desire of the human connection reader and celebrating the unique human elements of the storytelling,” said the CEO of Authors Guild, Mary Rasenberger, when the project was announced.
At the moment, the certification is only available to the members of the guild, and only for books written by a single author.
According to Raluca Albu, guild communications director, more than 2,000 titles have registered to date.
“I would say that the vast majority of book consumers are not really interested in the content generated by AI,” said Degen. “Everyone is playing at this time. What we really need is that IA developers show much more good faith and say: ‘Yes, these are problems.”
