Like mushrooms after an autumn rain, a new flush of books have popped up on Amazon that claim to provide everything you need to forage your next meal from local parks and woodlands—an increasingly popular hobby in the wake of the pandemic. The books appear to part of a large new wave of books that are being assembled and “published” using artificial intelligence (AI). And experts are concerned that some of them may give misleading, even dangerous, information to novice foragers.
Chef and forager Alan Bergo says he first heard about the books from a worried Facebook post by John Kallas, a fellow forager and author, who runs Wild Food Adventures in Portland, Oregon. Kallas wrote, “We are in a new era of scams,” calling the books a “disturbing trend” and the product of people “that don’t give a hoot about wild foods, don’t know wild foods, and want to drain you of your money.”
But Bergo didn’t think much of this complaint until he was reviewing a manuscript for a new foraging book and saw that the author had referenced a book that he knew from Kallas was “plagiarized blatantly” from the work of fellow forager Sam Thayer.
“I was just incensed, and it was on from there,” Bergo says. The reference was a wake-up call, he says, that “this is way more of a pervasive problem than I had imagined, and we need to squash this right now.”
“This is way more of a pervasive problem than I had imagined, and we need to squash this right now.”
The alarm in the wild food community goes well beyond plagiarism, however. A trained forager—the sort that would usually publish a book on the topic—would not only guide readers towards foods that are safe to harvest and detail how to prepare them for consumption but would also talk about how to avoid overharvesting for the health of the wider ecosystem. By scraping and collating information without an expert’s guiding hand, these AI books could lead novices to make damaging and potentially deadly mistakes.
Generative AI, the technology behind the popular ChatGPT tool, can be used to “write” books in seconds by drawing from text available online and in published manuscripts. With the use of self-publishing tools like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, those books can be made available for purchase within a few hours. At present, there are over 3,000 books on Amazon that list ChatGPT as an author or co-author, less than a year after the tool’s debut.
The book world is already grappling with controversy around AI as a result, including a scandal around allegedly AI-written books published under a real author’s name without her consent, and a New York Times investigation into a flood of AI-written travel guides. Comedian Sarah Silverman is one of three authors suing both OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies trained their systems on datasets illegally containing their books.
In July, nearly 8,000 authors signed a letter asking AI companies to stop using their writing to generate text without the authors’ consent and without compensation; this summer, these complaints received some solid backing when an journalist from The Atlantic obtained the Books3 data set, which listed 183,000 copyrighted ebooks that had been pirated and used to train generative AI systems at Bloomberg and Meta. .
And while numbers are hard to come by, the popularity that foraging saw during the worst of the pandemic seems to have continued: foraging accounts are booming on social media, and those who run wild food workshops continue to report record attendance.
After Bergo posted a video about AI-generated foraging books on Instagram, Alexis Nikole Nelson, a forager with a cumulative 5.9 million followers on her popular @blackforager Instagram and TikTok accounts, posted her own warning about the books. Since then, several have been taken down by Amazon.
“Amazon is constantly evaluating emerging technologies and is committed to providing the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for authors and customers,” Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told Civil Eats in an email. “All publishers in the store must adhere to our content guidelines, and while we allow AI-generated content, we reserve the right to reject or remove AI-generated content that does not meet those guidelines. We’re committed to providing a safe shopping and reading experience for our customers, and we take matters like this seriously.”
Amazon has recently taken some steps towards controlling the proliferation of these books, by limiting the number of books an author can self-publish through the site to three per day and requiring that self-publishers disclose whether their work was AI-generated. However, the company did not say if they have any method of verifying these disclosures, and copyright compliance is entirely the responsibility of the seller.
In other words, new books appear to replace the ones removed quite easily. In her video, Nelson compared them to the mythical hydra, which grows two heads every time you cut one off.