'The risk is real': Book on Manitoba mushrooms suspected to be written by AI
CTV
A Manitoba professor is warning the public after a book on regional mushrooms that he suspects is AI-generated was delisted from Amazon.
A Manitoba professor is warning the public after a book on regional mushrooms that he suspects is AI-generated was delisted from Amazon.
Alexandre Brassard, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Université de Saint-Boniface, said a student alerted him to a book available on the e-commerce titan's site, purporting to offer a guide to Manitoba mushrooms.
Brassard is a political scientist by trade, but has cultivated a passion for wild mushrooms for over 35 years. He is also the founding president of the Winnipeg Mycological Society.
Needless to say, "Mushrooms of Manitoba: A Fungal Odyssey Through the Heart of Canada" by Jay O. Mark sounded right up his alley.
"It was a cheap book - about $25, so it wasn't a big risk," he told CTV News Winnipeg.
But when it arrived, Brassard was concerned with what he read.
For starters, the book offered a limited overview of regional fungi. According to Brassard, Manitoba has about 3,000 species of mushrooms, and the book only fully describes about 15.
