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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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I see exactly 0 'latest happenings' on the frontpage

I would call this a happening.

Ai-generated books are already trying to get people killed

Link leads to panic filled reddit thread that leads here.

Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon

A genre of AI-generated books on Amazon is scaring foragers and mycologists: cookbooks and identification guides for mushrooms aimed at beginners.

Amazon has an AI-generated books problem that’s been documented by journalists for months. Many of these books are obviously gibberish designed to make money. But experts say that AI-generated foraging books, specifically, could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe.

Not terminators, not killer drones, but mushrooms are the method chosen by AI to exterminate mankind.

Unstoppable move, except that Skynet forgot one little detail. Mushroom hunting is cornerstone of Slavic culture, Slavs are taught how to pick mushrooms since childhood and do not fall for this trick. If the rest of humanity perishes, Slavs will survive.

edit: link fixed

I mean didn't Russia's top rocket scientist just die from eating a poisonous mushroom he picked in the woods?

One of my favourite anecdotes is about an elderly Russian PMC couple that vacationed in a boutique hotel in the Swiss Alps. They were walking down a terrainkur when they saw it: a perfectly shaped and very edible mushroom growing under a nearby tree. They had no choice, they couldn't have left it unpicked. Then they saw another one. And another. Then their hands were full and they found a plastic bag in one of their pockets. Soon the bag was full and they turned their windjackets into makeshift sacks.

They came to only in their hotel room, with more mushrooms than they could reasonably expect to process and no kitchen in which to clean and cook them. Undeterred by that minor hurdle, they filled the bathtub with water, dumped the mushrooms in there to soak and went for a pre-dinner, this time mushroom-free, stroll.

The maid had seen some weird shit in her line of work, but she was not expecting to see a bathtub full of mushrooms when she entered the room for turndown service.

Indeed, The guardian just published an article on this in the last hour: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

Literal empirical confirmation we get newsworthy stuff before the big sites.