In particular, know how to identify the common and deadly species (eg: much of the genus Amanita) yourself, and get multiple trustworthy field guides for your part of the world.
While I would not advocate anyone taking up amateur mycology under any circumstances, let alone with an app, or book, to guide them, it’s important to note that this article is biased and makes false or misleading claims.
The main issue is that it is talking about AI and meaning LLM-based algorithms. But it uses a study that showed that apps which identify mushrooms are inaccurate in which all of the apps predate, and do not use, LLMs as part of their identification process.
Countering misinformation with misinformation isn’t generally the best option in my opinion so I just wanted to point that out.
you have sort of a weird take on this? like here are our premises, what we know with certainty:
- all mycology apps tested to date are known to be poor (highest accuracy less than 50%)
- all LLMs are known to be fairly poor
and the author is deriving the conclusion:
- mycology apps that happen to be LLM-based have a high likelihood of being poor, so be careful
like yes, it’s not an empirical conclusion because someone still needs to do the work of testing the LLM mycology apps. i’d call it maybe an evidence based hypothesis that the average consumer should heed rather than find out the hard way and get poisoned.
but i think you condeming it as “biased,” “misinformation” or “misleading” is unnecessarily harsh. to me this looks like basic pattern recognition and forming hypotheses based on real evidence.
maybe i am missing a hole in the logic here and if so let me know.
LLMs have literally zero value in any context vaguely related to any kind of advanced computer vision project. It is fundamentally impossible for them to improve the capability of a mushroom recognition app in any way.
It’s not misinformation to state the fact that it’s an absolute certainty that anyone claiming to use an LLM to identify a mushroom is a scammer.
true to your name you kind of put my comment into less words, nice 👍
Any guide, app or whatever, with or without LLM, should generally ALWAYS refer to similar plants & shrooms on their pages, especially if they’re dangerous. But yeah, never trust “AI” for anything blindly. It’s not smart. It’s just a tool that still requires a lot of user input & common sense to be actually useful.
Has any government done anything about the innumerable negligent implementations of AI yet? Every day feels like a countdown to catastrophe.
The EU at least tries to regulate AI with the AI Act
It’s not a catch all, but some things are banned from using AI and others will need an assessment before going live. Some other will not need an assessment, but serious incidents need to be reported
No need to vilify fungi specifically. Plants can kill you too. Or even animals. If you’re going to hunt or forage you have to know your shit.
Yes, but mushrooms are typically harder to identify than plants are, so AI is surely not very good at it. Even mycologists are only learning in recent years that some mushrooms which they had long believed to be the same species are in fact entirely different species (thanks to genetic testing).
I myself forage for both plants and mushrooms and I practiced identifying mushrooms for years before I would eat anything I found.
Death camas and wild onion are not easy to tell apart. Chanterelles and morels can be identified safely and easily by beginners by looking at a few key features. Neither should use an app to ID.
You missed the word “typically”. I well know that there are exceptions.
I read it, just don’t agree on the generalization. I think it’s more that there’s a cultural phobia of fungi, and not really that they’re harder to ID safely than plants.
As somebody who forages for both, I can confidently say that you are unfortunately incorrect. Just read up a little bit on the modern history of mycology and you will learn that experts can’t even identify one fungi from another without looking at its DNA in many cases.
Mushroom ID requires a lot more than just immediately available visuals. You’ve gotta see what the cap looks like, the stem, how the stem connects to the cap, the specific characteristics of the gills, the substrate it’s growing in, and the spore print (i.e. leave it on a piece of white paper, covered, for a number of hours undisturbed so it drops its spores). And even then it can be tough if the mushroom is abnormal or is decaying at all.
With enough info, I’m sure you could train an ML model to ID mushrooms. But you’d need to give it a lot of info to make a successful ID.
Anybody trusting ChatGPT for life or death answers deserves their Darwin Award
close, more like, anybody allowing ChatGPT to be marketed as though it can answer life or death questions should be held accountable for lying to the public for profit
cough cough OpenAI cough cough
While we’re at it can we force OpenAI to change their name since they aren’t running open source code?
yes!
