cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12723593
Plant ID has its own drawbacks, now I'm actually aware of the major invasive species in my region and I see them everywhere now.
At least I have some cute wild carrots.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Do not trust plant id apps to determine if anything is edible, for a start. The odds of a painful death are just too high. There is no substitute for actually learning plant id fundamentals.
Anyone who dies trusting this shit with their lives was murdered by silicon valley grifters. Man slaughtered by grifters?
Yes the tech bros have some culpability, but everyone is responsible for what they put in their mouths. If you eat a strange plant without double checking, I mean, you did it to yourself.
Go ahead and bag on tech bros, I will join you. But I will also save a measure of my scorn for those who believe them to be trustworthy.
They thought they were checking.
They thought they were asking fucking computer god. Because they were told that, and nobody pushed back but a few fringe weirdos who were shouted down from all sides.
Yeah absolutely. A few plant IDs I've tried have said very confidently that a plant is a specific thing, but then after reading descriptions and checking the scientific name it's very clearly not that. It does generally give a good place to start though. So maybe it's not black cohosh but it leads me to find out it's bugbane, for instance.
I have eaten some things I've foraged, but only things I've checked and double checked don't have any dangerous lookalikes. Thankfully it's hard to go wrong with a blackberry vine.
"Hey AI, is this mushroom edible?"...
Yes! ~~only for shroom weevils - instantly fatal to humans~~
Other universally gud AI
- text to speech
- speech to text
- language translation
That's a different type of "AI", anyway. Most of what's fucking everyone over right now is LLMs, and LLMs are not doing plant identification. Though I suppose it's probably similar tech to facial recognition, and that one is definitely fucking people over, too.
Nah, I aksd ChadGBP what this plent is, and it said a plat name. Ergo…
While mushrooms aren't plants, I'm reminded of a couple who ate lethal mushrooms because their AI written book showed them a picture of those lethal mushrooms and said they were harmless (they thankfully survived, but they still got badly sick).
However I'm guessing by plant identification AI you mean less AI book and more active 'What's this plant?' type AI
I'd rather not have to pay the subscription, but PictureThis on iOS has been invaluable to my partner and I with identifying native plants to try and grow in our wildlife pond or to transplant into our yard for local pollinators. You can see a plant doing well in nature and snap a photo to learn what it likely is, if its native, and its common use case.
Using reverse image search to ID a plant based on its leaves and flowers is pretty fun since they tend to be unique-ish and easy to tell apart. Would never try to ID mushrooms without expert advice, never mind eating them.
Classifying > generating
generating is just repeatedly classifying a high dimensional input with an unusally large set of classes.
the Ai that isn't bad is not getting shoved down my throat every day.
If you are comfortable trusting your life to a dice roll, I guess this meme is accurate.
The use case here is to use AI to identify the plant, then cross reference it with an actual expert source to confirm.
Except its¹ not even useful for that.
¹not ai. And if it were there would be ethics/labor concerns.