Six months ago, I spoke with a man named Elan Trybuch about a problem he was seeing online. He kept coming across different ebooks about mushroom foraging that looked somehow off. Off as in: maybe poisonous.

The books were shorter than most foraging guides were, and way, way cheaper, says Trybuch. 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.

…The problem of very low-quality, very low-priced, probably at least partially AI-generated ebooks is not confined to mushroom foraging. 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.