I’m writing because I wanted to draw your attention to a worrisome article that affects everyone in the herbal medicine community, and I suspect you’ll share my concern.
Recently, Originality AI, an AI detector, published an extensive study of available herbalism titles on Amazon (https://originality.ai/blog/likely-ai-herbal-remedies-books-study) and found 82% of them were created by AI. Of course, no AEON titles were found to be AI generated (as you know, we only publish authentic works), but that’s not the concern here. Instead, what’s alarming is how the proliferation of such works puts all herbalists at risk.
Certainly, herbal practitioners have faced a lot of societal prejudice and legal obstacles, and it’s taken significant collective work to earn the respect and trust of the wider public. Unfortunately, the explosion of computer-generated herbalism books containing not just false but also dangerous advice may lead to a larger backlash against all herbalists.
Obviously, we cannot single-handedly stop this. But we can push back against this machine logic, and we’d love your help with taking the first step.
We’ll be crafting a statement that includes responses from our authors and others about the dangers of AI herbal texts, and we’d be honoured if you’d send us a short (25-100 word) statement regarding how AI herbal texts affect you and the wider herbal medicine community. We’ll then collect these together and ask you to help us publicise it once it’s published.
Many thanks for taking the time to read and consider this matter.
All the very best,
Oliver Rathbone
Publisher
Aeon Books