'The risk is real': Book on Manitoba mushrooms suspected to be written by AI

Manitoba mushroom book delisted from Amazon U of M’s David Gerhard talks about why the ‘Mushrooms of Manitoba’ book 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.

Even more concerning, deadly species like amanitas and lepiotas were left out altogether.

Content aside, the writing style raised a red flag.

"It's like something had been translated from Google Translate," he said.

"The book is filled with turn of phrases that no native speaker would use, that no mycologist would use. The tone also changes enormously from one passage to another. It goes from very colloquial to very sciencey."

Brassard said none of the book's claims are backed by sources or any reference texts.

As a professor, he is trained to spot plagiarism or work generated by artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT. He strongly suspected the latter was the culprit. Instead of a failing grade, the price of this AI-generated writing could be life and death, he said.

"The risk is real. In Manitoba, we have over 200 poisonous species and about 20 deadly poisonous species, so a mistake can be fatal."

Brassard wrote a review of the book and posted it to the Winnipeg Ecological Society's Facebook page, which has over 11,000 members. He also posted it as a review on the book's Amazon listing.

It went viral within the small Winnipeg mycological community.

The book was also delisted from Amazon soon after. Brassard never found out why, and was also never able to track down the author.

"He's not known in the local community and he hasn't published any other book, and he's certainly not a local mycology professor. To write a book about Manitoba mushrooms, you would need to be based here and ideally teach or have some credentials, and I couldn't find anything at all."

In a statement from Amazon, a spokesperson confirmed the book is no longer available for purchase.

"We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods to evaluate the content in our store, whether AI-generated or not," Amazon spokesperson Tim Gillman told CTV News Winnipeg in an email.

He noted content guidelines for books sold through Amazon's marketplace can be found on its website.

Tips for spotting AI-generated material

David Gerhard, who is head of the University of Manitoba's computer science department, said the book shows several telltale signs of being written by artificial intelligence.

"There are phrases in it that don't make sense. There's a lot of very generic text, and the images were also just stolen from the Internet, from different places," Gerhard said.

The computer scientist has tips for foraging for a non-AI-generated book online. Gerhard said consumers should be wary of books with only one review and that are self-published.

He also advised confirming the author's identity and that the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is legitimate.

"There's an awful lot of self-published books that are AI-generated and not trustworthy."

- With files from CTV's Rachel Lagacé