memes

It wasn't wrong. All mushrooms are edible at least once.

I tell people who work under me to scrutinize it like it's a Google search result chosen for them using the old I'm Feeling Lucky button.

Just yesterday I was having trouble enrolling a new agent in my elk stack. It wanted me to obliterate a config and replace it with something else. Literally would have broken everything.

It's like copying and pasting stack overflow into prod.

AI is useful. It is not trustworthy.

Amanitas won't kill you. You'd be terribly sick if you didn't prepare it properly, though.

Edit: amended below because, of course, everything said on the internet has to be explained in thorough detail.

Don't rely on it for anything

FTFY

I once asked AI if there was any documented cases of women murdering their husbands. It said NO. I challenged it multiple times. It stood firm, telling me that in domestic violence cases, it is 100% of the time, men murdering their wives. I asked "What about Katherine Knight?" and it said, I shit you not, "You're right, a woman has found guilty of killing her husband in Australia in 2001 by stabbing him, then skinning him and attempting to feed parts of his body to their children."...

So I asked again for it to list the cases where women had murdered their husbands in DV cases. And it said... what for it... "I cant find any cases of women murdering their husbands in domestic violence cases..." and then told me of all the horrible shit that happens to woman at the hands of assholes.

Ive had this happen loads of times, over various subjects. Usually followed by "good catch!" or "Youre right!" or "I made an error". This was the worst one though, by a lot.

Main problem this presents is how its incapable of expressing doubt or saying I don't know for sure.

The single most important thing (IMHO) but which isn't really widelly talked about is that the error distribution of LLMs in terms of severity is uniform: in other words LLM are equally likely to a make minor mistake of little consequence as they are to make a deadly mistake.

This is not so with humans: even the most ill informed person does not make some mistakes because they're obviously wrong (say, don't use glue as an ingredient for pizza or don't tell people voicing suicidal thoughts to "kill yourself") and beyond that they pay a lot more attention to avoid doing mistakes in important things than in smaller things so the distribution of mistakes in terms of consequence for humans is not uniform.

People simply focus their attention and learning on the "really important stuff" ("don't press the red button") whilst LLMs just spew whatever is the highest probability next word, with zero consideration for error since they don't have the capability of considering anything.

This by itself means that LLMs are only suitable for things were a high probability of it outputting the worst of mistakes is not a problem, for example when the LLM's output is reviewed by a domain specialist before being used or is simply mindless entertainment.

There is mush room for improvement.

What a brilliant idea - adding a little "fantasy forest flavor" to your culinary creations! 🍄

Would you like me to "whip up" a few common varieties to avoid, or an organized list of mushroom recipes?

Just let me know. I'm here to help you make the most of this magical mushroom moment! 😆

You have to slice a fry it on low heat (so that the psychedelics survive)... Of course you should check the gills don't go all the way to the stem, and make sure the spore print (leave the cap on some black paper overnight) comes out white.

Also, have a few slices, then wait an hour, have a few slices then wait an hour.

In my country we had a rise in people going to the ER with mushroom poisonings due to using AI to verify whether or not they were edible. Dunno if this meme is just a random joke scenario that coincidentally is a true story or if I am just out of the loop with world wide news.

In any case, I felt it was absolutely insane that people would use AI for something this serious while my bf shrugged and said something about natural selection.

I mean, he asked if it can be eaten not what the effects of eating it are. 😅

Apparently, that's a fly agaric, which some sources on the internet say can be used to get you high. I still wouldn't do it unless an actual mycologist told me that it was okay

AI for plant ID can help, if you are using it to then compare to reference images and details based on its output. Blindly following it would be insane

people using ai tools for things they're not good for and then calling the tool bad generally as opposed to bad for said task do a disservice to any real issues currently surrounding the topic such as environmental impact, bias, feedback loops, the collapse of Internet monetization and more.

I hate AI but, I mean... That one is edible if you properly cook it. So the AI is technically correct here. It just didn't give you all the info you truly needed.

AI is especially terrible with ambiguity and conditional data.

The difficulty with general models designed to sound human and trained on a wide range of human input is that it'll also imitate human error. In non-critical contexts, that's fine and perhaps even desirable. But when it comes to finding facts, you'd be better served with expert models trained on curated, subject-specific input for a given topic.

I can see an argument for general models to act as "first level" in classifying the topic before passing the request on to specialised models, but that is more expensive and more energy-consuming because you have to spend more time and effort preparing and training multiple different expert models, on top of also training the initial classifier.

Even then, that's still no guarantee that the expert models will be able to infer context and nuance the same way that an actual human expert would. They might be more useful than a set of static articles in terms of tailoring the response to specific questions, but the layperson will have no way of telling whether its output is accurate.

All in all, I think we'd be better served investing in teaching critical reading than spending piles of money on planet-boilers with hard-to-measure utility.

(A shame, really, since I like the concept. Alas, reality gets in the way of a good time.)

The lesson is that humans should always be held responsible for important decision making and to not rely on solely ML models as primary sources. Eating potentially dangerous mushrooms is a decision that you should only make if you're absolutely sure it wont hurt you. So for research If you choose upload a picture to chatgpt and ask if its edible instead of taking the time to learn mycology, attend mushroom foraging group events, and read identification books, well thats on you.