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
I have heard that spore prints are a reliable way of determining mushroom species (removing the stem, putting the underside of the mushroom on an ink pad, pressing against paper, and comparing the print with those of known species).
I bet an AI could analyze that data pretty well. But since there’s really no market for such a product, if I want it, I would have to make it myself. In which case I highly advise against using it because I really don’t trust me.
There is no ink involved, the spores make the print.
https://doubleblindmag.com/mushrooms/how-to-grow-mushrooms/how-to-make-a-spore-print/
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.
Wait that’s genius. I would listen to Snoop Dogg teaching me particle physics any day of the week.
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.
I think the key here is you’re using it for yourself only.
I think it comes down more to understanding what the tech is potentially good at, and executing it in an ethical way. My personal use is one thing; but Speechify made an entire business out of it, and people aren’t calling for them to be burned to the ground.
As opposed to Google’s take of “OMG AI! RUB IT INTO EVERYONE’S NOSE, THEY’RE GONNA LOVE IT!” and just slapping it onto the internet, and then pretending to be surprised when people ask for a pizza recipe and it tells them to add Elmer’s Glue to it…
Two controlled inputs giving a predictable output; vs just letting it browse 4chan and see what happens. The tech industry definitely seems to lean toward the later, which is fucking tragic, but there are gems scattered throughout the otherwise pure pile of shit that LLMs are at the moment.
In my opinion using someone’s voice without their consent in a public way is unethical, but you doing it in private doesn’t hurt anyone.
Say that again, but think of a a fat old white dude jerking off to what he’s created, and you’ll figure out several ways it could hurt someone.
The blanket term “AI” has set us back quite a lot I think.
The plant thing and the deepfakes/search engines/chatbots are two entirely different types of machine learning algorithm. One focussed on distinguishing between things, the other focussed on generating stuff.
But “AI” is the marketable term, and the only one most people know. And so here we are.
It’s particularly annoying because those are all AI. AI is the blanket term for the entire category of systems that are man made and exhibit some aspect of intelligence.
So the marketing term isn’t wrong, but referring to everything by it’s most general category is error prone and makes people who know or work with the differences particularly frustrated.
It’s easier to say “I made a little AI that learned how I like my tea”, but then people think of something that writes full sentences and tells me to put dogs in my tea. “I made a little machine learning based optimization engine that learned how I like my tea” conveys it much less well.I hate when streamers/gamers/etc refer to procedural generation as “ai generated”. It’s infuriating.
I particularly “Love” that a bunch of like, procedural generation and search things that have existed for years are now calling themselves “AI” (without having changed in any way) because marketing.
Reminds me of how everything on a computer used to be a “program”, but now they’re all just “apps”
I will die on the hill of calling them computer programs.
Oh man this one drives me up the wall too.
Someone literally with a straight face said how cool Minecraft has AI generated worlds and I wanted to flip a table.
I suppose both plantnet and deep fakes have conv networks as part of their architectures though
“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.
I still don’t see how AI-generated porn is any different from photoshopping someone’s face on to someone else’s naked body.
It’s less effort and typically more realistic (in the sense that it looks more real, not that it is)
But it’s unethical either way, don’t make non-consensual porn
I am a physicist. I am good at math, okay at programming, and not the best at using programming to accomplish the math. Using AI to help turn the math in my brain into functional code is a godsend in terms of speed, as it will usually save me a ton of time even if the code it returns isn’t 100% correct on the first attempt. I can usually take it the rest of the way after the basis is created. It is also great when used to check spelling/punctuation/grammar (so using it like the glorified spellcheck it is) and formatting markup languages like LaTeX.
I just wish everyone would use it to make their lives easier, not make other people’s lives harder, which seems to be the way it is heading.
With all the hot takes and dichotomies out there, it would be nice if we could have a nuanced discussion about what we actually want from AI right now.
Not all applications are good and not all are bad. The ideas that you have for AI are so interesting, I wish we could just collect those. Would be way more helpful than all the AI shills or haters rn.
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
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”.
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.
I have a feeling I know where your username came from.
sorry couldn’t hear you over the CRUNCHING OF MY MEAL
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.
Using it for plant identification is fine as long as it’s an AI designed/trained for plant ID. 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.
The difference is that plant identification is a classification problem, not an LLM.
Not all of AI is LLMs, most aren’t.
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
The most annoying thing since the rise of LLMs is that everyone thinks that all of AI is just LLMs
Classification machine learning models can also be neural networks, which is something that was called AI also
Some customer support “bots” could be considered classification problems, no? At least in so far as which department does a call get routed to.
Could be. Classification is a type of problem. LLM is a type of model. You can use LLMs to solve classification problems. There’s a good chance that’s what’s happening here.
Sign up with iNaturalist for plant and animal identification! Citizen science is good for you.
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.
First time I’ve seen this meme template. Love it.
I am totally looking forward to AI customer support. The current model of a person reading a scripted response is painful and fucking awful and only rarely leads to a good resolution. I would LOVE an AI support where I could just describe the problem and it gives me answers and it only asks relevant follow up questions. I can’t wait.
They’re already deployed and they’re less than helpful, because LLMs are bullshitting machines.
I already use llms to problem solve issues that I’m having and they’re typically better than me punching questions into Google. I admit that I’ve once had an llm hallucinate while it was trying to solve a problem for me, but the vast majority of the time it has been quite helpful. That’s been my experience at least. YMMV.
If you think I suck, I’m guessing you haven’t actually used telephone tech support in the past 10 years. That’s a version of hell.
The script doesn’t go away when you replace a helpdesk operator with ChatGPT. You just get a script-reading interface without empathy and a severally hindered ability to process novel issues outside it’s protocol.
The humans you speak to could do exactly what you’re asking for, if the business did not handcuff them to a script.
upscaling of old media is pretty cool too
Upscayl app does this quite well without chagpt ai stuff
I’ve learned that training a model to search your (companies) unmaintainable, unorganized, and continuously growing documentation storage is a godsend.
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”.
