Dion Rosser- legit or AI author?

I just received one of their books, 'Root Cellaring', when I thought I had ordered another book with an incredibly similar title. After the first couple pages with almost zero information, many punctuation/grammatical errors, and straight up incorrect statements (using the Tundra as an example of a warm environment), I decided to look into the author. They appear to have written over 20 books on vaguely homesteady topics in the last few years. Has anyone else read their books? I really don't feel like the information is reliable and for something like a Root cellar it could be quite dangerous if it lead to unsafe builds.

I don't know but the reviews across all his books on Amazon the reviews are all suspiciously in similar increments with nearly every publication hovering around the same average star rating regardless of publication method.

The Spanish versions and Goodreads listings seem to show this trend more clearly. Like ~5 people rate it highly. But maybe the more popular English Amazon listings get more bot reviews purchased.

Could be a coincidence, maybe he's got a very dedicated fanbase that buys all his books in a category and they all leave similar reviews...but seems more like bot reviews to me.

Without analyzing the content and reviews closely I can't be certain.

T Simpson wrote:I don't know but the reviews across all his books on Amazon the reviews are all suspiciously in similar increments with nearly every publication hovering around the same average star rating regardless of publication method.

The Spanish versions and Goodreads listings seem to show this trend more clearly. Like ~5 people rate it highly. But maybe the more popular English Amazon listings get more bot reviews purchased.

Could be a coincidence, maybe he's got a very dedicated fanbase that buys all his books in a category and they all leave similar reviews...but seems more like bot reviews to me.

Without analyzing the content and reviews closely I can't be certain.

Yeah, it's all smelling fishy to me. I will be sending an email to the local book store that I ordered it through in the morning!

Mistakes not exclusive to ai authors.   I've known many a real human made excessive mistakes in books.  Much worse now that self publishing is so easy.  Fact checkers and editing just slow things down.

More interesting to me is how to read critically.   How to evaluate what we read for internal inconsistencies and how it compares with what we know of the world.

Even colouring books have a high chance of being ai generated now.  I got one on roosters and not one bird had fewer than 12 toes.  They even left some of the shutterstock logos in.  Another publication that would have benefited from a real human glancing at it before publishing.


That said,  there is a lot of good stuff on homesteading written by real humans in the digital market here on permies.

r ranson wrote:Mistakes not exclusive to ai authors.   I've known many a real human made excessive mistakes in books.  Much worse now that self publishing is so easy.  Fact checkers and editing just slow things down.

More interesting to me is how to read critically.   How to evaluate what we read for internal inconsistencies and how it compares with what we know of the world.

Even colouring books have a high chance of being ai generated now.  I got one on roosters and not one bird had fewer than 12 toes.  They even left some of the shutterstock logos in.  Another publication that would have benefited from a real human glancing at it before publishing.


That said,  there is a lot of good stuff on homesteading written by real humans in the digital market here on permies.

For sure,  it's possible that it is a human 'content farm' writing the books. It's just a bit disheartening, to fall victim to what feels like a ruse.

I do dabble a bit in digital content but I really enjoy a physical book, especially for reading before bed!

There are quite a few physical books in the digital market too... it just started digital and the name hasn't caught up yet.

And some of those books are also on amazon.  Free shipping is lovely.  

I have heard that there are a bunch of foraging books that are ai written by identities with fake bios that are showing up on Amazon. That is potentially VERY dangerous!
At least, info that it is happening showed up in my Tumblr feed, so some people are spreading the word out there.
I thought the tiktok "plant hack" guy was bad enough! At least most of what I've seen of his stuff is just kinda dumb and not likely to work well long term, ( or introduce invasive plants to unsuitable places) but not actively dangerous.

Review Meta, https://reviewmeta.com/ a site where you put in the amazon link to the product and it scans it for bad reviews has that book adjusted from a 4.4 down to 4.0 stars and it removed "40% of potentially unnatural reviews" with an "Overall Fail review grade".

His bio reads very generic with no vocational or educational resume and all the book titles are generic and seem to cover most permie topics.

Also image search pulls up a picture of a young guy as a writer, but Amazon bio pic has an older guy?

Not many actual written reviews on Goodreads and plenty of grammar complaints there as well.

Dian Green wrote:I have heard that there are a bunch of foraging books that are ai written by identities with fake bios that are showing up on Amazon. That is potentially VERY dangerous!
At least, info that it is happening showed up in my Tumblr feed, so some people are spreading the word out there.
I thought the tiktok "plant hack" guy was bad enough! At least most of what I've seen of his stuff is just kinda dumb and not likely to work well long term, ( or introduce invasive plants to unsuitable places) but not actively dangerous.

Yes, I heard that as well. That's actually what made me think that this may be something similar. It's pretty eery that we can't even be sure that a book is written by a person anymore.

Kyle Hayward wrote:Review Meta, https://reviewmeta.com/ a site where you put in the amazon link to the product and it scans it for bad reviews has that book adjusted from a 4.4 down to 4.0 stars and it removed "40% of potentially unnatural reviews" with an "Overall Fail review grade".

His bio reads very generic with no vocational or educational resume and all the book titles are generic and seem to cover most permie topics.

Also image search pulls up a picture of a young guy as a writer, but Amazon bio pic has an older guy?

Not many actual written reviews on Goodreads and plenty of grammar complaints there as well.

You're right, I found the same when googling him. Thanks for the review meta info. Super suspicious!

Unlike trash fiction, these AI fakes have the potential to do real harm to real people. (Edit: I just noticed Dian Green posted about this above.)

I posted about AI fake wild foraging books in another thread, with an article that cites credible sources:
https://permies.com/t/226141/Warning-Potentially-Fake-AI-Wild

I just bought/read Smoking and Salt Curing by Dion Rosser and felt the info was eerily familiar, like it had been ‘picked up’ from other sources. Way too much fluff and grammatical errors, but worse, too many out and out contradictions and grotesquely poor English so the meaning was ambiguous. So worrisome I googled the author and now find this string of similar concerns by others. But, maybe I’m a bot! This bot will be returning the book.

I don't know anything about this particular author, but waaaaay back in 2012 when I first starting learning how to publish my fiction, there were a slew of ebooks around telling people it was possible to make $$$ publishing non-fiction after a few hours online searching and some copy-paste work.  So many poor quality non-fiction ebooks appeared on the main online ebook selling site, clearly written using this technique.  It's only going to get worse now there are so many AI apps that do the internet scraping for those publishers. And there are plenty more even less ethical services offering to post good reviews on books (and  bad reviews to competitors books!) for a price.

Why being able to read reviews and recommendations from real people on sites like this are a blessing!