Plants, maybe. Fungi, hell no.
AI + fungi = you die
Actually I use it as a starting point for fungi. Seek will usually get me to the genus, and from there I can cross reference various books to narrow it down. Hell, sometimes it’ll give me an exact match, and then I just have to perform a yes or no ID with my field guides. That being said, I mostly end up with no, I’m shit scared of all amanitas and most mushrooms just aren’t tasty enough to warrant the effort.
Fungi is literally fun tho. Mostly to see how wrong that fucker is. It’s just as wrong as me
That’s essentially what the Flood is in Halo
I don’t actually know if it’s considered a deepfake when it’s just a voice; but I’ve been using the hell out of Speechify, which basically deepfakes voices and pairs them with a text input.
…so… nursing school, we have an absolute fuck-ton of reading assignments. Staring at a page of text makes my brain melt, but thankfully nowadays everything’s digital, so I can copy entire chapters at a time, and paste them into Speechify. Now suddenly I have Snoop-dogg giving me a lecture on how to manage a patient as they’re coming out of general anesthesia. Gets me through the reading fucking fast, and it retains so, SO much better than just trying to cram a bunch of flavorless text.
Speechify also pays the people who’s voices they’re using rather than taking them from publicly available videos and recordings without permission.
That’s also the business model behind ad localization now, they’ll pay the actor once for appearing on set and then pay them royalties to keep AI editing the commercial to feature different products in different countries.
If they’re up front about it and if the actor agrees to it (as with Speechify), I don’t see a problem with that. SAG should also be involved to try and determine fair compensation.
Wait that’s genius. I would listen to Snoop Dogg teaching me particle physics any day of the week.
Do not use ai for plant identification if it actually matters what the plant is.
Just so ppl see this:
DO NOT EVER USE AI FOR PLANT IDENTIFICATION IN CASES WHERE THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES TO FAILURE.
For walking along and seeing what something is, that’s fine. No big deal if it tells you something’s a turkey oak when it’s actually a pin oak.
If you’re gonna eat it or think it might be toxic or poisonous to you, if you want to find out what your pet or livestock ate, if you in any way could suffer consequences from misidentification: do not rely on ai.
You could say the same about a plant identification book.
It’s not so much that AI for plant identification is bad, it’s that the higher the stakes, the more confident you need to be. Personally, I’m not going foraging for mushrooms with either an AI-based plant app or a book. Destroying Angel mushrooms look pretty similar to common edible mushrooms, and the key differences can disappear depending on the circumstances. If you accidentally eat a destroying angel mushroom, the symptoms might not appear for 5 to 24 hours, and by then it’s too late. Your liver and kidney are already destroyed.
But, I think you could design an app to be at least as good as a book. I don’t know if normal apps do this, but if I made a plant identification app, I’d have the app identify the plant, and then provide a checklist for the user to use to confirm it for themselves. If you did that, it would be just like having a friend just suggest checking out a certain page in a plant identification book.
The problem with AI is that it’s garbage in, garbage out. There’s some AI generated books on Amazon now for mushroom identification and they contain some pretty serious errors. If you find a book written by an actual mycologist that has been well curated and referenced, that’s going to be an actually reliable resource.
Are you assuming that AI in this case is some form of generative AI? I would not ask chatgpt if a mushroom is poisonous. But I would consider using a convolutional neural net based plant identification software. At that point you are depending on the quality of the training data set for the CNN and the rigor put into validating the trained model, which is at least somewhat comparable to depending on a plant identification book to be sufficiently accurate/thorough, vs depending on the accuracy of a story that genAI makes up based on reddit threads, which is a much less advisable venture
The books on Amazon are vomited out of chat GPT. If there’s a university-curated and trained image recognition AI, that’s more likely to be reliable provided the input has been properly vetted and sanitized.
If you’re using the book correctly, you couldn’t say the same thing. Using a flora book to identify a plant requires learning about morphology and by having that alone you’re already significantly closer to accurately identifying most things. If a dichotomous key tells you that the terminating leaflet is sessile vs. not sessile, and you’re actually looking at that on the physical plant, your quality of observation is so much better than just photographing a plant and throwing it up on inaturalist
Not to mention, the book is probably going to list look-alike plants, and mention if they are toxic. AI is just going to go “It’s this thing”.
You can easily say the same thing. Use the image identification to get a name of the plant and google it to read about checking if the sessile is leafy or no.
The difference between a reference guide intended for plant identification written and edited by experts in the field for the purposes of helping a person understand the plants around them and the ai is that one is expressly and intentionally created with its goal in mind and at multiple points had knowledgeable skilled people looking over its answer and the other is complex mad libs.
I get that it’s bad to gamble with your life when the stakes are high, but we’re talking about the difference between putting it on red and putting it on 36.
One has a much, much higher potential for catastrophe.
sorry couldn’t hear you over the CRUNCHING OF MY MEAL
I have a feeling I know where your username came from.
Like I get what you’re saying but this is also hysterical to the point that people are going to ignore you.
Don’t use AI ever if there are consequences? Like I can’t use an AI image search to get rough ideas of what the plant might be as a jumping off point into more thorough research? Don’t rely solely on AI, sure, but it can be part of the process.
“AI renaming image files for easier search”
You’re cool, though, you can stay
Alphafold? Beautiful. Perfect. No notes.
Nudeify type apps? Fuuuuck alllll the way off!
We’re in that awkward part of AI where all the degenerates are using it in unethical ways, and it will take time for legislation and human culture to catch up. The early internet was a wild place too.
The difference is that plant identification is a classification problem, not an LLM.
AI isn’t just about LLM. Modern AI libraries (pytorch, tensorflow etc.) can be used for being trained with all sorts of data.
I would guess it is a conv neural network which is probably similar to what is being used in any image/video related AI such as deep fakes
upscaling of old media is pretty cool too
Depends.
Old, niche videogames where the fanbase doesn’t have the capacity to do it? Sure. James Cameron replacing Arnold with a UHD leather Muppet in True Lies? Not so much.
I would watch that remake though
Dammit, I made the prospect sound too much like fun. :/
Upscayl app does this quite well without chagpt ai stuff
I’ve had to literally perform a Google search to find a customer support phone number before. Because the website of the company just kept redirecting me in circles.
Their phone support was just as useless, though.
It was GameStop, by the way.
Gethuman.com is my go-to. They used to be much better than they are now, but it’s still routinely better than trying to navigate automated systems or find phone numbers myself
We need to strike back with an AI customer which alerts us if we could finally talk or chat again with a human if all automatic solutions are discussed.
Fuck YES
I’ve just taken to randomly pressing buttons until it gives me a human.
I’ve had automated systems just straight up hang up on me when I ask for a customer service representative instead of actually linking me to one. Because it says it “couldn’t understand me”.
If i won the lottery, id invest in that.
hmm guess which one also doesn’t suck the energy equivalent of a sizeable town
I’d like all ai service to publish the energy used in training the model and performing inference.
“Queries uses an average of X kWh of power. A model training run requires X MWh, and the development of this model over the years required X TWh of power.”
Then we could judge companies by that metric. Off course, rich people would look for the most power-draining model for the sake of it.
development of this model over the years required X TWh of power
This part is kind of hard to measure. When do you start counting? From the first work that informed the research direction eventually leading to this model? From the point where the concept of this final model first came about? Do you split the energy usage between multiple models that came from the same work?
First time I’ve seen this meme template. Love it.
Using it for plant identification is fine as long as it’s an AI designed/trained for plant ID (even then don’t use it to decide if you can eat it). Just don’t use an LLM for plant ID, or for anything else relating to actual reality. LLMs are only for generating plausible-sounding strings of text, not for facts or accurate info.
Best and easiest way is to reverse image search from a photo, it’s easy to look through the results for yourself and see what actually matches (it’s frequently not the first search result). Perhaps there’s some kind of AI involved in reverse image search, but searching like this is infinitely preferable to me instead of some bot telling me an answer which may or may not be correct. It’s not “convenient” if you actually care about the answer.
Mushroom identification is extra flaky.
Expert level mushroom identification is a skill and I wouldn’t recommend anyone use those apps and assume a mushroom is correct. (And especially don’t eat it without absolutely verifying)
Plant identification - not concerned. Most normal people aren’t ingesting a plant in the wild. And I mean if you’re rubbing against a plant and get a reaction, ideally that’s a lesson you only learn once.
Sign up with iNaturalist for plant and animal identification! Citizen science is good for you.
The button to take a photo of a plant/animal?
“Observe”
Hold up gang, I need to observe this species right quick
Instant scientist cred
I’ve learned that training a model to search your (companies) unmaintainable, unorganized, and continuously growing documentation storage is a godsend.
AI search is legitimately useful.
For something like Salesforce development, you’ve got the answer spread across their old framework docs, their new framework docs, their config settings reference page, and a couple stack overflow questions.
Copilot / Bing search has legitimately been incredibly helpful at synthesizing answers from those and providing sources so that I can verify, do more research, and ask follow up questions.
AI search is great.
The more “searchey”, and less “generativey”, the better. What goes against the direction every provider is going, but it’s still great.
I like using perplexity because the ads aren’t in your face and it’s pretty good at providing concise answers… And it doesn’t fuck with my news feed every time I look up some random thing
It’s really god to search things that you don’t know the name already.
