Using AI to spot edible mushrooms could kill you | Hacker News Reader

Using AI to spot edible mushrooms could kill you

washingtonpost.com

22 pointsbookofjoe26 comments

> The mini-explosion of AI mushrooms apps is emblematic of a larger trend toward adding AI into products that might not benefit from it — from tax software to therapy appointments.

Oh, dear. Yeah, none of that is going to go well. Kind of surprised that Apple and Google haven’t put their foot down about the mushroom identification and therapy, at least; that’ll get people killed. And I wouldn’t want to be the person whose argument to the tax authorities for their dodgy return was that a magic box said it was okay…

I bet my government is already salivating at the idea of replacing thousands of their own (unionized, pensioned) tax employees with AI. Then we'll be in the Kafkesque hell of "am I going to jail because my AI tax assistant is wrong, or the government's AI tax processor is wrong?"

I've already gotten one recruiter email from an AI tax prep startup, which is just a hilariously bad idea. Hallucinate yourself all the way to prison.

Worth noting that "Huggingface" the company got it's name from and started as an attempt to use LLMs for therapy.

Did it actually? Maybe it's for the best they pivoted, then, because that name is somewhat unfortunate. Calls to mind the facehugger from Alien... not exactly the ideal therapist.

I legitimately thought "huggingface" was an Alien reference.

Is this true? I thought it was just named after the emoji. I knew they had a chatbot product at one point but I didn’t think it was for therapy.

I feel like there are PLENTY of "AI" apps someone could have made and still been first to market, long before they got down the list to "eat this fungus, trust me bro" territory.

Why? It already decides if you get into a school, get a loan, get past the screening for a job and heck, if you're online dating, who your potential life partners are. You might as well eat the mushroom, bro. You trust it for everything else.

If I recall correctly, you need to triangulate of bunch of data points to ID a mushroom with some confidence:

* How the mushroom grows in relation to siblings. E.g. solitary, or a sparse cluster, or a dense cluster

* Where the mushroom is growing. I recall stuff growing off dead wood to be particularly dangerous

* The color of the spore print (cut off the cap and put it on a piece of paper for a day and all the spores drop onto the paper and leave a colorful print)

* Characteristics of the mushroom fruit itself. Whether it had a veil, etc.

Often the mushroom you want to eat has all the same characteristics with some other inedible or poisonous other mushroom, except for one of these criteria

It's conceivable to have an app that walks you through all those steps. But yeah if it's just going off of a picture of a mushroom fruit, that's pretty sketchy

I also remember coming away from my studies with the simple but effective heuristic to never, ever eat a foraged all-white mushroom. Seems like those ones have particularly high risk of melting your guts (literally)

I personally never could get into foraging not because of fear of poisoning, but rather because I learned that many mushrooms are super-accumulators of metals, similar to fish.

Not AI, but the USDA Agricultural Research Service has apparently developed a test strip for detecting amatoxins in some of the deadliest and most common poisonous mushrooms:

https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2020...

There is a simple 100% precision algorithm for detecting non-poisonous mushrooms in the continental United States. Look under the cap; if its spongy it won't kill you. It it's not spongy (aka ruffled), it could be poisonous so toss it out. Yes, your edible mushroom recall might be slightly reduced, but you're guaranteed to not get poisoned.

This is exceedingly bad advice as there are several spongy mushrooms which are toxic in the US: Bolete Huronensis, Sutorius Eximius, Boletus Sensibilis to name a few. There are a few in genus Leccinum as well.

You're - maybe - reasonably sure you won't die. You may still get really ill. North America isn't my area of knowledge, but I know there are several boletes that are poisonous, just not quite as deadly as the worst gilled mushrooms.

North America is also big, so these rules of thumb you have learned may not apply to a different part of it. I know that here in Norway, there's a rule that all mushrooms with true ribs (not sponge, not gills) - chanterelles -are edible. It's one of the easiest, most solid rules you learn here (from the state- approved official foraging society, something most other countries don't have).

But it's not true in North America. You have poisonous chanterelle varieties.

Works great till you find a little patch of mushrooms imported accidentally from Asia...

Mushrooms in mushroom books are not representative of mushrooms in the wild. They're typically very nice specimens where every important characteristic is visible. Well-photographed, too.

That there's an abundance of these sorts of apps is virtually a guarantee that most of them haven't understood how hard it actually is to train a classifier for this.

I think the problem is that tech companies have overstated the benefits of AI and for obvious reasons they have been understating the risks associated with relying on it.

There are examples in the article dating back to 2015 but for non-tech people today, it might come across as "If an AI can converse, draw pictures of what they ask and identify a bunch of random things, it can surely identify a mere mushroom"

/r/shroomid even people that are sure hesitate to say you should eat whatever you took a photo of.

https://wapo.st/3wQniBt

Sounds like a good "rite of passage" test for membership in the AI cult --- where the results don't matter.

There are VERY few (if ANY) mushrooms that can kill you after taking a test bite and waiting 20 min to see how you feel.

This story is warning against people people mushrooms in LARGE quantities of unknown origin or type. Any moron knows that so only the idiots are making this mistake anyway

This is a risky idea to spread in public. A single Destroying Angel [1] can kill, and the onset is 2-3 days IIRC. So for you to say "just wait 20 mins" is way too short of a timeframe.

It also seems plausible to take a test bite, decide not to eat anymore because you feel bad, but you've already done a little damage to your organs

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_ocreata

That is definitively not the way to test mushrooms.

Yes, there are mushrooms that can kill you that way, and a lot more that can seriously harm you. False morels, funeral bells, deadly webcaps, a bunch of different amanitas... in the case of deadly webcaps, you won't notice until a few days. But then you're going to need new kidneys.

Basically every webcap is suspected of being carcinogenous too, and look up Julius Schäffer if you think there can't possibly be long-term effects of eating mushrooms that "seem fine" after 20 minutes.

of unknown origin or type

Very few people end up in hospital because they are randomly eating mushrooms of unknown origin or type. They end up in hospital because they 'know' the type of mushroom they are eating, and just happen to be wrong.

Yes, overconfidence is the big killer, and OP is definitively at risk if he thinks eating a bit of it is a good way to ID edibility.

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