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Detection Firm Finds 82% of Herbal Remedy Books on Amazon 'Likely Written' By AI (theguardian.com) 42

Posted by msmash from the slop-everywhere dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: With gingko "memory-boost tinctures," fennel "tummy-soothing syrups" and "citrus-immune gummies," AI "slop" has come for herbalism, a study published by a leading AI-detection company has found. Originality.ai, which offers its tools to universities and businesses, says it scanned 558 titles published in Amazon's herbal remedies subcategory between January and September this year, and found 82% of the books "were likely written" by AI.

"This is a damning revelation of the sheer scope of unlabelled, unverified, unchecked, likely AI content that has completely invaded [Amazon's] platform," wrote Michael Fraiman, author of the study. "There's a huge amount of herbal research out there right now that's absolutely rubbish," said Sue Sprung, a medical herbalist in Liverpool. "AI won't know how to sift through all the dross, all the rubbish, that's of absolutely no consequence. It would lead people astray."
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Detection Firm Finds 82% of Herbal Remedy Books on Amazon 'Likely Written' By AI More

Detection Firm Finds 82% of Herbal Remedy Books on Amazon 'Likely Written' By AI

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  • This is exactly why I stick to (Score:5, Funny)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday October 23, 2025 @11:51AM (#65745726)
    Good old colloidal silver and horse dewormer. I just make a milkshake out of it with some raw milk and bleach.
  • It's complete bullshit and potentially harmful either way.

    • We always talk about oil companies, tech companies, medical insurance and military contractors as these big all powerful lobbyist forces but skirting by public blame blame is the US supplements industry which has to this day manged to stay almost criminally unregulated.

      It's also (along with local car dealerships) a financial pillar of the Republican political machine. They've long made it a strategy to focus on conservative alternative media (Alex Jones, Rogan and such are always pushing some new brain pil

    • How can they tell the difference between AI-generated herbal slop and human-generated herbal slop?

  • How can they tell (Score:5, Interesting)

    by liqu1d ( 4349325 ) on Thursday October 23, 2025 @12:05PM (#65745766)
    Between the normal snake oil rubbish that has invaded herbalism and the AI generated?
    • I think it would be the same as anything else. If your new age book of woo contains a lot of em dashes, it was something generated by an AI. What will people do when they find out that an AI has been writing their horoscopes?

    • Between the normal snake oil rubbish that has invaded herbalism and the AI generated?

      That's an obvious consequence of the Big Pharma war on anything that doesn't make them a profit. The regulations they buy drive legitimate herbalism underground. The US doesn't recognize studies from other countries, using bullshit excuses about how they don't meet our standards to justify this, when those standards are parts of laws purchased by Pharma Cos in order to keep down competition.

    • The AI generated snake oil is easier to read and better written?

  • Human generated nonsense is replaced... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Thursday October 23, 2025 @12:06PM (#65745774)

    ...by AI written nonsense.
    Nothing of value was lost.

    • not completely. you do realize most modern medicine comes off from ripping off nature. like aspirin came from willow bark. now are claims exaggerated yes sometimes. but the same thing for modern medicine as well. pills often treat the symptom not the cause.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        Some herbal medicine also works. Why? Because it has the same chemicals in it. You can get your aspirin from willow bark and it might work.
        The difference is, that if you buy the pills you know exactly how much is in there. If you chew the bark you may have too much or to little.

      • Shhh, don't tell them that human medicine wasn't created from nowhere, and that the big thing that is useful with "conventional medicine" is purity and standardized dosing. (The problem comes when we see some benefits from plant based medicines, extract the active ingredient, not realizing there are other ingredients in the plant that help support the mechanism of the drug.)

  • I'd rather like to see a list of genres which haven't been entered by AI slop yet. Like, look for camera handbooks. The worst examples even show AI-generated fantasy shapes for the camera they're pretending to describe...

    • I bought a camera recently, went to the manufacturer's website and downloaded the manual. Didn't see any indication of AI.

      The part I skipped was Amazon, it sounds like that might be the source of your problem.

  • ... but how do they come to the conclusion, what methods and tools do they do? I guess part of me is jaded by the continual debates over something being AI or not on other platforms often fueled by "AI checkers" whose accuracy range from dubious to dogshit at best.

    • There's a lot of details in TFA. In short, the introduction of TFA shows that some of those books are written by non-existent authors, who founded non-existent societies, include backpage editorial reviews from non-existent journalists in non-existent journals. They also include the typical odd sentences, repeated sentences. https://originality.ai/blog/li... [originality.ai]

  • "There's a huge amount of herbal research out there right now that's absolutely rubbish," said Sue Sprung, a medical herbalist in Liverpool.

    And now some of it is AI.

  • "This is a damning revelation of the sheer scope of unlabelled, unverified, unchecked, likely AI content that has completely invaded [Amazon's] platform,"

    I'd say this should be FAR more an eye-opening revelation as to the unrelenting speed at which AI can infect anything.

    Herbal Remedy books are how old? And AI is how young?

    Yeah. THAT fast. 82% is absolutely fucking insane given the many centuries it took humans to write presumably tens of thousands of tombs globally on the topic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      82% is a lot. I assume there was some cherry picking around publication dates (like 'published in last 12 months') that isn't in the summary for that to be true. If I was going to blast out AI generated books to make a quick buck, alternative medicine is one of the areas I'd probably target.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Just RTFA and yes, they only looked at a small, recent window so the high number makes more sense:

      Originality.ai, which offers its tools to universities and businesses, says it scanned 558 titles published in Amazon’s herbal remedies subcategory between January and September this year, and found 82% of the books “were likely written” by AI.

      • I'm guessing the vast majority of the total total would be from the last 50 years. In the preceding centuries you have maybe a half-dozen notable surviving works on herbal remedies.

  • AI is going to have some safety mechanisms in generation, there's a chance the AI written herbal remedies are actually safer than a lot of what human authors of the genre are saying

    • AI is going to have some safety mechanisms in generation, there's a chance the AI written herbal remedies are actually safer than a lot of what human authors of the genre are saying

      There are plenty of remedies proven safe, effective, and beneficial that have been absolutely demonized by Greed N. Corruption. There are also many reasons to purposely infect a population if said government over the population benefits greatly from not only the Medical Industrial Complex, but also population control that death by design (policy), creates.

      It will be interesting to see where AI lands on the side of morality, health, and profit. We will quickly see who's pulling the AI strings when we start

  • Best I can tell there's already a classic book in this space: Earl Mindell's Herb Bible. Its a neat coffee table book. You can just read parts at a time and it is enjoyable. Super fun to look out for the herbs that specifically warn they're unsafe during pregnancy ;-) Made me wonder just how effective a cocktail of these would be to induce a miscarriage.

  • Would not surprise me if it were really easy to tell the difference between AI slop and excellently researched / well written books.

    But it could also be really hard to tell the difference between AI slop and the poorly written ramblings of idiots.

  • An AI-detection company makes headlines for declaring that a bunch of books have been outed by their amazing AI-detection technology. It's not that hard to believe. However, how much of that claim is valid? How many of the 82% AI-tagged books were incorrectly identified, or is the claim that their detection is 100% correct? AI-detection for school assignments is often incorrect. My kids have had their personally written paragraphs flagged by AI, which, of course, prompts me to make fun of them.

    Then aga

  • They appear at dawn, wearing linen and the scent of boiling nettles.
    With solemn faces, they explain that science is fine, but their aunt once cured a migraine by humming at rosemary.

    They call coffee “bean infusion” and water “structured.”

    Every sentence begins with “as an empath,” and ends with “raise your vibration.”

    Their kitchens look like witch covens sponsored by Whole Foods.

    They speak of detoxing — as if their intestines were a 1980s swimming pool.

    Ha

    • Actually their kitchens look more like an example of septic laboratory conditions. Don't forget, SOMEONE has to buy those infomercial herbal pads you stick on your feet to 'detox' with.

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