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Using AI to spot edible mushrooms could kill you | AI tools are good for some things, but don’t trust your health to apps that make frequent mistakes (wapo.st)

submitted 7 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I read the article and its linked sources in a few cases. How else would I have been able to directly address them?

When Australian scientists tested the accuracy of popular mushroom ID apps last year after a spike in poisonings, they found the most precise one correctly identified dangerous mushrooms 44 percent of the time.

Notice this paragraph which links to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36794335/

The extract for which talks about the following apps:

Picture Mushroom (Next Vision Limited©), Mushroom Identificator (Pierre Semedard©), and iNaturalist (iNaturalist, California Academy of Sciences©)

None of which use LLMs and predate the issue that the article is talking about. I checked, before my comment, all of their pages on the iOS App store, at least. They're all 4+ years old and none use LLMs.

Amusingly enough, the Public Citizen article linked earlier in OP's article calls out iNaturalist as something they've been working with to positively improve the experience of identifying mushrooms:

https://www.citizen.org/article/mushroom-risk-ai-app-misinformation/

The Fungal Diversity Survey, a project devoted to correcting the many gaps in understanding regarding fungal biodiversity, partners with iNaturalist to document and verify mushroom observation

But ultimately there were no apps ACTUALLY TESTED that use OpenAI or LLMs for their identification.

[–] JoBo@feddit.uk 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Where does the article say the problem started with AI? It doesn't even mention LLMs, just the explosion in grifter apps since it became easier to produce a grifter app.

If you read the article, you did not read it properly.

[–] GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago

And they didn't test any of them, and linked to an actual test which ALSO didn't test any of them as if it supported the claim that these apps are, as you (but not the article) say, are grifter apps.