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.
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/
Ah, thanks for the correction, never done it myself and learned about it a long time ago so I’m not surprised I remembered it wrong.
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.
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.
“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.
The difference is that plant identification is a classification problem, not an LLM.
Not all of AI is LLMs, most aren’t.
I think state machines are cool and groovy. I still don’t understand genetic algorithms but I wish I did.
15 years ago we were all saying “AI is just a series of IF statements” because of expert systems and y’all forgot
Some customer support “bots” could be considered classification problems, no? At least in so far as which department does a call get routed to.
At least it’s routing you to a department instead of trying to help you solve the issue yourself by showing you different help pages you already looked at before trying to contact support.
AI isn’t just about LLM. Modern AI libraries (pytorch, tensorflow etc.) can be used for being trained with all sorts of data.
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.
nuanced discussion about what we actually want from AI right now.
👆
So on Bluesky, the non-free almost-Twitter Twitter replacement, as anti-AI as X-Twitter is pro: you see extreme anti-AI sentiment with zero room for any application of the tech, and I have to wonder if defining the tech is part of the problem.
They do want Gmail to filter spam, right?
They don’t hate plant ID apps, do they?
I’m guessing they mean “I don’t need ChatGPT, which was enabled by theft, and I don’t want chatbots in other apps either.”
But they come out saying effectively “don’t filter spam!” the way they talk. At least arguably: not like every expert in the field would use the exact same definition, but still I doubt the average absolutist is fully aware what their message may come across as.
Also works well for the opposite use case.
I’m a good programmer but bad at math and can never remember which algorithms to use so I just ask it how to solve problem X or calculate Y and it gives me a list of algorithms which would make sense.
Yeah I’ve been using it to help my novice ass code stuff for my website and it’s been incredible. There’s some stuff I thought yeah I’m probably never gonna get around to this that I rocketed through in an AFTERNOON. That’s what I want AI for. Not shitty customer service.
First time I’ve seen this meme template. Love it.
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
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
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.
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.
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’m still hoping for good customer support AI. If I’m going to be connected to someone who barely speaks English and is required to follow a prewritten script, or worse plays prerecorded messages to fake being fluent, I might as well talk to an AI, especially if it means shorter hold times.
AI is a bad replacement for good customer service, but it could be an improvement over bad customer service.
Glad you posted this, b/c I now have a follow up to a previous comment where I shared this from Klarna (amongst other tidbits):
So Klarna automated L1 support, did a good job at it, and saved money. Apparently they could’ve done it early without LLMs and saved even more money.
Have you ever wanted L1 support? :)
Guess even if not it still could give reps more time to handle your queries if they’re not telling people to click “forgot my password” when they write in saying “hey I forgot my password”.
Ai search is cool though
Mine’s really good at IDing Dicots…
The excitement when you get a monocot though…
Not so sure what is so cool about “regularly wrong and dangerous”.
Going for a hike, seeing a nice plant and saying: I wonder what this plant is. And most of the time getting a correct answer.
If people is stupid enough to eat wild things based on any kind of unprofessional identification it may be just proving that Darwin was onto something.
Right, so when you need an ID but don’t really care about whether it’s correct, AI is great I guess. Not sure what the point is though.
But if you actually want a proper ID, I’d stay far away from AI and go to community with experts.
I have use it a lot while hiking and mostly got correct results for tree or small planta identification to satisfy my curiosity. Good enough for me. I’m not calling the National Center for Botanics neither hiring a professional botanic for 2000€/hour just to satisfy my curiosity while hiking.
It has its use cases. I would trust it as much as those old plant books for amateurs I used to have. I would also got incorrect identifications out of those due my lack of expertise, more so that with the AI I use nowadays.
