• punkfungus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    People are saying you shouldn’t use AI to identify edible mushrooms, which is absolutely correct, but remember that people forage fruits and greens too. Plants are deadly poisonous at a higher rate than mushrooms, so plant ID AI has the potential to be more deadly too.

    And then there’s the issue that these ID models are very America and/or Europe centric, and will fail miserably most of the time outside of those contexts. And if they do successfully ID a plant, they won’t provide information about it being a noxious invasive in the habitat of the user.

    Like essentially all AI, even when it works it’s barely useful at the most surface level only. When it doesn’t work, which is often, it’s actively detrimental.

    • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io
      0·
      1 month ago

      Even analytical AI needs to be questioned and validated before use.

      1. I wouldn’t trust a AI to ID mushrooms for consumption.

      2. I forget the details, but there was a group training a diagnostic model (this was before “AI” became the popular term), and it was giving a lot of false positives. They eventually teased out that it was flagging low quality images because most of the unhealthy examples it was trained on came from poorer countries with less robust healthcare systems; hence the higher rates of the disease and lower quality images from older technology.

      • shrugs@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        It’s like these geoguesser not guessing the country by the plants and streets or houses, but by the camera angle and some imperfections only occuring in pictures taken in that country.

        “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”