When Donovan Thiesson came across a new book about mushroom picking in Saskatchewan, he didn’t anticipate having to warn people against reading it.
Thiesson, an avid forager and mushroom expert from Meadow Lake, runs a Facebook group about mushroom picking. Late last month one of his users alerted him to a new book being sold on Amazon, Edible Wild Mushrooms of Saskatchewan.
After reading only a few paragraphs of the book, Thiesson became alarmed.
“It’s absolutely terrible and inaccurate,” he said. “First off, it’s missing Chapter 7. There are mushrooms with the wrong photos, and there are great inaccuracies about the edibility of certain mushrooms.
“To say that wild mushrooms in Saskatchewan can be eaten ignores the fact that there’s a good number that will kill you.”
Thiesson says he immediately suspected the book was AI-generated.
The CBC collaborated with Originality.ai, an Ontario-based firm that detects AI-produced content, to test Thiesson’s theory. A sample from the conclusion of the book scored a 100 per cent on the site’s AI detector.
The book’s author, Victor Howard, was selling another digital-only mushroom picking book on Amazon, Edible and medicinal plants for the elderlies [sic]. Both have now been removed from the site, but can be found under the author’s Goodreads profile.
The books were self-published, and no other information about Howard was available on either website.
According to Amazon’s guidelines, AI-generated content such as books and artwork may be sold as long as the seller discloses that fact to buyers. However, it leaves verification up to its customers.
In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Tim Gillman said the site is proactive in finding people who break its rules.
“We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines,” he said.
Jonathan Degen, the CEO of the Writers Union of Canada, says he’s seeing more and more AI-generated books pop up online.
“It highlights the sort of extreme problem that we’re dealing with right now in terms of controlling intellectual property within our writing and publishing industry,” he said.
“We have always seen fake books,” Degen said, referring to earlier practices of fraudsters copying Wikipedia pages of famous figures and selling them as unauthorized biographies. “Now, I guess they don’t have to go to a Wikipedia page to just grab all that content. They can create the content themselves.”
Some organizations are fighting back.
In January the American Writers Guild launched a “human authored” certification that authors can use in their books and marketing materials to verify their human origins.
“The human authored initiative isn’t about rejecting technology — it’s about creating transparency, acknowledging the reader’s desire for human connection, and celebrating the uniquely human elements of storytelling,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said when the project was announced.
At the moment the certification is only available to members of the guild, and only for books written by a single author.
According to Raluca Albu, the guild’s director of communications, more than 2,000 titles have been registered to date.
“I would say the vast majority of book consumers are not really interested in AI-generated content,” Degen said. “Everybody is just playing catch up right now. What we really need is for the AI developers to show a whole lot more good faith and say, ‘Yeah, these are problems.'”
