The robot uprising is here, and they’re trying to kill us with bad foraging advice.

When foraging, it’s said that you should be as confident identifying edible plants in the wild as you are in a grocery store. Foragers also say that the best way to learn is to have an experienced person to guide you. Not everyone has access to someone like that, though. Enter: Books about foraging.

Now, gathering and eating wild plants based entirely on the photos and descriptions in a book can be a bit intimidating. For some plants, this isn’t a big deal — wineberries, for example, are an invasive edible that’s really easy to pick out. Garlic mustard and wild onions, too. Some plants don’t really have poisonous lookalikes, so the odds of making a dangerous mistake are pretty slim. Others, not so much.

All of this is to say that books about foraging aren’t all bad. At least, they weren’t.

Here’s where shit gets weird.

Here Come the Robots

People looking to make a quick buck have turned to artificial intelligence and Amazon’s publishing platform to pump out a lot of barely-concealed drivel. A lot of this is in the form of children’s books, I guess because they seem easier to make than a full-length novel. This is far from harmless, because children’s books play a role in the development of literacy and empathy that you don’t really want to hand off to a computer.

This attempt to cash out isn’t limited to children’s books, either. Amazon and other online book sellers have become the proud purveyors of foraging books written by AI. This isn’t really a new phenomenon, but, on the off chance any of you out there’re in the market for foraging guides, I figured I’d give you a heads up.

To be fair, a lot of these are simply useless and the worst they’ll do is waste your money. The books in this category claim to be foraging guides, but end up being about why foraging is good, listicles on the benefits of eating more fruits and vegetables, and recipe ideas. Pretty harmless overall.

On the other hand, there are books offering actual descriptions of “edible” plants and mushrooms(!). Some of them even list “taste” as an identifying feature of plants and fungi, which could encourage inexperienced foragers to taste things they haven’t positively identified. Since many extremely poisonous mushrooms are visually similar to harmless ones, this could get someone killed. Hell, plenty of people already mistake poisonous mushrooms for edible ones even without books encouraging them to taste them.

Spotting Foraging Fakes

It’s not always easy to pick out which books are written by actual human people, and which aren’t. There are a couple of things that you can look for:

• Publishing dates. Books written before the rise of AI generated content are a safer bet here.
• The author’s web presence. Even if they have a photo, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a person. The photo could be stolen (just see any of the fake identities on Scamfish), or made up by a different AI. Look for a blog. A Facebook page. A TikTok. An Instagram. Something to indicate an existence beyond the cover of a dodgy book.
  As this article from 404 Media states, “‘Edwin J. Smith’”’ is the author listed on two books[,] but doesn’t have any other books, or an online presence otherwise. The only Edwin J. Smith I could find was a Professor Emeritus of medicine at Indiana University from a staff list that’s more than a decade old.”
• The author’s credentials. They should be actual, and not completely made up. Beware of author bios that offer vague, unrelated information.
• A sample of the prose. A lot of bots pull from very varied sources, so you’ll get bits that sounds like they’re cut from a recipe blog, a florist’s website, an actual foraging manual, and so forth. These are also likely to be thrown together without much thought, because no actual humans looked at it to make sure it’d make any damn sense at all.
• The editing. Bad, AI generated foraging guides often have mistakes that any human editor (or writer, for that matter) would pick up on right away.
• A bad score from an AI-detection tool, like Scribbr or GPTZero. Get a sample of the text, paste it in a detection tool, and see what it says. While you’re at it, paste the author’s bio in there, too.

Again, if you’re able to, connect with an experienced foraging expert before going out in the field on your own. Your local university may be able to help you. You might even be able to find a group of foraging enthusiasts on sites like Meetup. Even if you can’t go out with a foraging expert, they may be able to recommend actual, useful guides, videos, and other resources for you.