🍄 AI-generated yikes

Remember the good ol’ days of meeting your friends at the mall to grab a smoothie and get asphyxiated by cologne at Hollister?

We sure do — it was a pivotal coming-of-age experience.

Sadly, today’s teens won’t undergo their formative life moments among Lush bath bombs, because “going shopping” is no more.

Per Vox, the nostalgic pastime has been damaged by a slew of factors:

• Extreme theft-prevention measures in stores mean many items are locked up, leaving customers waiting for assistance.
• Inventory issues, supply chain woes, and reduced foot traffic have led to sparser shelves.
• The retail industry, which can be physically and mentally taxing, is facing a labor shortage.
• Understaffing can lead to long lines and strained customer service.

All of these changes have left us with a shopping experience that’s downright subpar.

And now, the outlook for your favorite strip mall is grim: UBS estimates 40k-50k retail stores will close in the next five years.

Even before the pandemic…

… brick-and-mortar stores were closing. And covid only made consumers more reliant on online shopping.

In 2021, Amazon unseated Walmart as the No. 1 apparel retailer in the US and ecommerce boomed.

The shift means less foot traffic in stores, but also decreased dwell time, a KPI that measures how long shoppers stay in a store; the longer they’re inside, the more they spend.

Shopping isn’t entirely extinct…

… It’s just different. Many consumers still prefer to shop in person (particularly for things like groceries).

But, when they do travel to a store, people want it to feel more like an outing and less like an errand.

In turn, more brands are adopting experiential retail practices — from upgraded store designs to traveling exhibits and pop-ups — to lure shoppers inside.

So hold out hope for shopping, and hold on tightly to those Auntie Anne’s pretzel bites, lest they ever try to take them away.

We here at The Hustle love Alexis Nikole Nelson’s TikTok account about safely foraging for edible flowers, herbs, and more.

But recently, Nelson posted about a book, Edible Wild Plants of the Midwest by Chris M. Wilson, on sale via Amazon. The problem? Wilson doesn’t appear to exist, with zero internet presence despite supposedly writing a foraging blog.

So, what’s going on here?

The prevailing theory is that AI-generated books with AI-generated author bios and images are trying to cash in on modern trends.

One Redditor dug deeper, finding several books on wild mushrooms that contained similar passages and formatting, and that were riddled with grammatical and factual errors.

That’s especially perilous when you consider that eating the wrong plant can sicken or even kill you. Death cap mushrooms, found in Australia, account for 90% of mushroom poisoning deaths in the world.

What can Amazon do?

We reached out to Amazon with three examples of foraging books thought to be AI-generated. Two, including the aforementioned, have since been removed.

Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told The Hustle that “all publishers… must adhere to our content guidelines, regardless of how content was created,” and that the company removes books in violation.

Guidelines do include not misleading customers, but it’s unclear how Amazon will stay on top of the glut.

People have admitted…

… to hawking AI-generated content on Amazon, including children’s books and poetry collections, but it’s also unclear how many “authors” fail to disclose their reliance on the tech.

Elsewhere on Amazon, author Jane Friedman found five works of “really low quality material” that claim she wrote them; she suspects someone trained AI using her publicly available blog.

This is one problem we don’t envy Amazon for having. And when it comes to foraging, we’d suggest sticking to known experts and, as Nelson frequently says, “Happy snacking, don’t die.”