Ripple CTO highlights AI controversy over dangerous Mushroom identification book

David Schwartz, Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, recently posted a viral Reddit post on his social media account, which tells the story of a family who was admitted to the hospital after consuming poisonous mushrooms, which they identified using an AI-generated book.

According to the Reddit post, the family used a mushroom identification book they bought from a popular store. The post stated that the book provided images and text created by AI to identify the mushrooms, but all of them were poisonous. The family consumed the mushrooms with the help of the book written by the AI, and all of them were admitted to the hospital, which is a big question mark on the AI content. 

Ripple CTO draws parallels to historical lawsuit

The post also stated that not only there are AI pictures in the book but also Chatbot replies in the text of the book suggesting that no human had a hand in it. Even though the retailer has apparently provided a refund for the book, the issue has made people question whether there could be more low-quality books written by AI for sale. 

In his social media post, Schwartz compared this event to a well-known lawsuit that occurred at the beginning of the 1990s. The Ripple executive cited Winter v. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a 1991 Court of Appeals case. The case points to two young adults who decided to purchase a book they named “The Encyclopedia of Mushrooms” to act as a reference.

The couple was forced to seek legal intervention against P. Putnam’s Sons for product liability, negligence, and false representation. Although the two mushroom hunters almost lost their lives because of the wrong information provided by the book, the court ruled in favor of the publisher. 

Identification guides face scrutiny over AI use

Schwartz’s use of this case demonstrates how the use of AI in content creation is not a positive thing and has legal ramifications. Whether books generated by AI can be subjected to similar legal procedures as more and more content is being produced with the help of AI is still up for debate. 

Schwartz wrote an X post concerning Quora, a popular question-and-answer website. This is not the first time that the Ripple CTO has criticized this website and how AI is being used on it. In his post, Schwartz highlighted some of the issues with the questions that Quora’s AI-generated, which he referred to as ‘AI-generated slop.’