this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
He’s a software engineer and volunteer secretary for the New York Mycological Society, a nonprofit devoted to “spreading knowledge, love and appreciation of fungi.” He knows mushrooms and he knows AI, and he thought the covers of these books were probably AI-generated.
Any readers looking to try to use these books to figure out which mushrooms were safe to eat and which weren’t would be out of luck, which to Trybuch was seriously concerning.
Garbage ebooks have been a problem on Amazon for at least a decade, but — not unlike many strains of fungi — they’ve exploded over the last few years.
Then they give the outline to a wildly underpaid ghostwriter to flesh it out into something that will pass muster as a real book.
The model is a dangerously inviting prospect for anyone who’s ever toyed with the idea of publishing a book but doesn’t want to actually write one.
The grift is that technology and retail platforms have incentivized a race to the bottom when it comes to selling books.
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