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.
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
I’ve done it a few times. Colours pop, some mood change, but overall it’s weak and not worth it. I didn’t get negative effects, it’s just a crap mushroom experience if you can get ahold of psilocybin mushrooms.
Seconded.
Should prolly try shamans piss version of amanitas. You know where a proper geezer who’s been eating these for decades dries them properly, then eats a whole bunch, then pisses in a dish and then you drink the piss.
That would probably get closer to the roots of what amanitas are about. I had a similar very mild but in no way negatively experience as you.
Laid on a sofa and it felt slightly like as if on a magic carpet through space. But like, that needed imagination, I wasn’t experiencing that, but if I had to describe what sort the mild feeling was.
Back in the 1970s some friends and I ate some fly agaric we found in the botanic gardens, because we’d heard it got you high. The other three went on to have a fantastic time, high as kites, in a nightclub. Me? I spent hours on my knees in front of the toilet, vomiting and vomiting and vomiting. Do not recommend.
You can, but people rarely do more than once, which should be an indication of how much fun it is.
Not a mycologist but…
Fry in a bit of butter. Taste is really good, i guess the muscimol is also a flavor enhancer. Cooking flashes off the other toxins. If eaten raw it will be a night on the toilet.
Can make you nauseas even when cooked, depends on your biology in general or on a given day. High is similar to alcohol. But it’s also a sleep aid similar to ambien.
Red cap with white specks, otherwise white. veil annulus, gilled, white sporeprint. Fruits in late summer through fall.
Amanite tue-mouche (fly killer).
It can indeed get you high if prepared properly (something about the peeling the skin/dots? Can’t remember).
But even if done correctly the high to sick ratio isn’t worth it I hear and it’s very easy to not prepare it properly. So I heard…
One method I heard of is having reindeer eat them, after that their urine becomes psychedelic, without liver damaging toxins.
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.
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.
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
I dont think it can beat randomly selecting plants. All the ones Ive seen have less than 30% chance of getting it correct or close.
Skynet takes this as an insult. Next you’ll imply that it’s an Oravcle product.
That’s not one of the published use-cases for the AI you’re parodying.
If you don’t read the manual and follow the instructions, you don’t get to complain that the app misbehaved. Ciao~
What exactly should LLMs be used for?
Each LLM is different. You have to read the use cases. Check the documentation, and if you can’t find it, try asking ChatGPT :)
While I understand what you’re trying to say, it should be on the owner of the software to ensure that the AI won’t confidently answer questions it isn’t qualified to answer, not on the end user to review the documentation and see if every question they want to ask is one they can trust the AI on.
I disagree for similar reasons.
There’s no good case for “I asked a CHAT BOT if I could eat a poisonous mushroom and it said yes” because you could have asked a mycologist or toxicologist. The user is putting themself at risk. It’s not up to the software to tell them how to not kill themselves.
If the user is too stupid to know how to use AI, it’s not the AI’s fault when something goes wrong.
Read the docs. Learn them. Grow from them. And don’t eat anything you found growing out of a stump.
If someone calls up Bank of America’s customer service and asks if they should eat a mushroom they found in their back yard, and the rep confidently tells them “yes”, do you think the response should be “Well, it’s not the rep’s fault you listened to their advice, you should have known that Bank of America isn’t a good source for mycology information”, or “That rep should have said ‘I don’t know, ask someone qualified’”?
I’d argue that it’s at least 50% on the person who gave the advice.
The customer is pushing the responsibility of protecting their own health onto someone else. It’s not that other person’s responsibility, it’s yours. You don’t get to sah “but I asked Timmy the 8th grader and he said yes” or “I asked an AI chatbot and it said yes” and then be free of responsibility. Protecting yourself is always your responsibility. If you get a consequence, it’s because of what YOU did, not because of Timmy or ChatGPT. ciao ~
Also there are too many cases to cover, so it’s impossible. Sure i do it for mushrooms but then i have to do it foe other 100 things
what do you mean?
That someone who develop an AI can block their AI from anwering some types of questions but there are too many things than an user can ask, it’s unrealistic to being able to cover everthing.
It’s unrealistic to expect a software developer to predict every type of ridiculous question a user could ask their software. That’s why they don’t. Instead, the publish use cases, eg. “Use my app to do X in Y situation” or “this app will do Z repeatedly until A happens”. Anything that falls outside of those use cases is an inappropriate use of the app, and the consequences are the fault of the user. Just read the docs, friend :) ciao
Exactly what i am saying
It wasn’t wrong. All mushrooms are edible at least once.
As hilarious as every other time it’s posted, but incorrect.
some of them are so toxic, just the act of touching or picking them could redact you, so you would not be able to eat it.
Redact me? What’s that?
I’m probably missing a joke, but there isn’t a single mushroom that’s toxic or poisonous from just touching. In fact, they are only poisonous if ingested, meaning you can chew on a poisonous mushroom, spit it out and be absolutely fine.
i was trying to be funny. fill redact with paralyse or kill.
I would not recommend chewing (and subsequent spitting) mostly because you do not know (of the top of your head) about the toxic dosage, and it may enter your blood (where if it enters, game over i guess). think some amount of exposed area near your gums, or micro-scissions. Same with picking, maybe you cut your nails recently and have exposed skin (blood will likely help by clottong and blocking) or while foraging, you ran next to a sharp branch or bark and have a deep scratch exposing blood. not likely stuff.
also i do not know much about mushrooms, and likely their toxic nature is completely different from stuff like ivies (poison ivy for example) where just contact on exposed skin can cause immune response (swelling, itching, etc), but maybe (possibly) some mushrooms would have some toxic thing on surface.
i do not know much about mushrooms
We can tell
sure, but was anything wrong in second paragraph?
(following comment is long, so natural guess would be that i used a llm to write it - i did not. my poor structure sentence, grammar and spellings should indicate that. So please read it - if you are uninterested, skip the middle section and jump mostly from 3rd last para).
since i clearly do not know mushrooms (or botany for that matter, i have studied biochem moostly at intro level, so that is about it), i looked up mushroom toxicity, and most websites roughly say ‘“generally safe” to touch, but don’t ingest and wash hands’. thing is, these guidelines are said for pretty much anything, since ingestion is the easiest way to go beyond our primary defense (skin). so i tried to look up mechanisms, and found the following article
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11333700/
so i am trying to find mechanisms of toxicity which do not specifically require digestion metabolic pathways (you have metabolic processes happening in all cells, so general oxidation and reduction do not count as ingestion specific, as that can happen from topical contact only).
gyromitrin - ‘Toxicosis can result from oral and inhalation exposure.’ so likely getting into bloodstream from lungs. further processes require hydrolysis at low ph, so not happening in blood as is. but if we consider a small amount of hydrolysis, it can still form formaldehyde on oxidation.
also
‘enzyme that is directly inhibited by gyromitrin is the pyridoxal phosphokinase. This enzyme is responsible for dietary vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) conversion into active pyridoxal 5-phosphate (Horowitz et al., 2024[53]). Moreover, in vitro and in vivo, MMH may generate hydrazones with pyridoxal-5-phosphate (Barceloux, 2008[8]). Pyridoxal-5-phosphate is a cofactor for glutamic acid decarboxylase and GABA transaminase in the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) synthetic pathway, which results in decreased GABA synthesis (Barceloux, 2008[8]). MMH can directly block glutamic acid decarboxylase when given intraperitoneally to rats at a concentration of 0.8 mM/kg, resulting in a further decrease in GABA levels (Medina 1963[71]).’
so gaba (for now, just consider it something required in brain for optimal signalling)(signalling refers to neuron activation here) is disturbed. this is a direct effect, no metabolic activity required.
moving onto - ‘Orellanine is a potent nephrotoxin found in some species of the genus Cortinarius’. nephro means kidney here.
Orellanine toxic pathway is not clear, but none of the proposed methods suggest metabolic pathways, and mostly go like after ingestion of so many grams, so and so amount is found concentrated in kidneys (and since the same compund is found, it mostly got absorbed into blood from intestines, and then filtered by blood.
also ‘Orellanine disrupts LLC-PK1 cell monolayers and inhibits membrane-bound alkaline phosphatase and cytosolic lactate dehydrogenase activity’
moving to Cyclopeptides - Phallotoxins and Amatoxins.
‘Amatoxins are able to inhibit mainly the activity of the RNA polymerase II (RNAP II) and also polymerase III (RNAP III), through α-amanitin and β-amanitin (respectively) (Diaz 2018[27]), resulting in decreases in mRNA content, causing deficient protein synthesis and cell death (Garcia et al., 2015[42]) (Figure 7(Fig. 7)).’
‘α-Amanitin has been shown to act synergistically with cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) and this may be the final cause of liver failure.’
then the article goes into antidotes.
point being - all the toxic things (except partly the first one, which would be much slower in one of its pathways) do not require digestive metabolic pathways, just have to reach blood, and then time and amount is key.
Should i say on stuff that I do not have knowledge about - no, mostly. my first comment was mostly written in humor, the way the parent commenter wrote. but then the asked about it in followup, and they guessed it was a joke too. but i still replied and gave a plausible reasoning for my comment, mostly because that is kinda how i like my humor (be at least partially based on reality, and then change it). could i have done a better job? sure, but I do not think i did a gross injustice. most comments that are written are not refering or citing reearch articles. I had heard of how some mushroom toxins work ( i had heard of nephro one sspecifically), so based my response on that. as to where i got that - i dont know, probably some youtube video.
And finally - can you please turn down the sass just a notch. you seemingly were unhappy with my comment (possibly a seasoned forager, or a mushroom toxicology researcher), unhappy enough to downvote both comments. and someone also agreed with you, so they likely have similar knowledge i presume. given these facts, would you like to revisit your comment, or voting. If nothing, at least respond to this comment. I think my ego is fragile enough to reply to a single line comment with 500+ words just so i can say i was write, but i do not like being wrong.
Up front, yeah, I absolutely didn’t read all of that. I am an amateur forager, and while I’m confident enough to sight identify common edibles and eat them, I don’t consider myself to “know about mushrooms” either. My problem with your comment is that it’s just as bad as AI giving advice; people might skim through and take it as fact without reading your little disclaimer, just like people skim through and take AI as fact without knowing better. That probably seems fine on the surface because your comment is just the opposite of the meme and, if followed, your advice will definitely prevent anyone getting poisoned. Unfortunately, it also will really discourage anyone interested in foraging. I’d hate for someone to miss out on a fun, healthy hobby because you can’t just keep your shit to your self.
Lemmy has communities where people who know what they’re talking about can give actual good advice. Please seek one out!
What they mean is that there is no mushroom that will kill you from touch or even chewing and then spitting. Amanita Phaloides needs around 20g of dry mushroom to kill a healthy human. I chewed some before and spat it out just to know what it tastes like, the only reason I won’t send a video of me doing it is because I want to stay anonymous.
There are however some scleroderma that can cause conjunctivitis from touching them and then touching your eyes.
i beg your pardon for following rudeness, but did you read the above message? I completely trust you that you tasted a mushroom and spat it, to live and tell the story to me, but what you are saying is that a certain mushroom requires a certain amount to kill a person. firstly i do not know how was that number found (as in ingestion or directly shooting it’s extract to blood). when you ingest, you do not absorb anything, and there is a potential that directly exposed will require a lesser critical dose. and beyond that - toxins do not require digestive pathways.
the number is most likely calculated by measuring the amount present in a failed organ (in a dead patient mostly) and scaling to whole body and asking from surrounding folks how much they ate, and then matching with toxin concentration in mushroom. this lethal amount is not same for direct blood stream exposure.
you possibly want to say something like - mushrooms do not have enough to kill you just from touch or chew/spit, but not will. will suggests that there is some specific reason that either mushrooms can not produce enoug toxin to kill you from touch.
I would still stand by my original statment that it is stupid to expose contact or chew/spit. I am not saying you are stupid, I hav willingly tasted/sniffed many chemicals (not safe ones), but that is more of a decision (as in for learning purposes like you did for taste or for fun(that i do mostly)). It does not make that activity safe.
Don’t rely on it for anything, period. (See Caelan Conrad’s recent videos on how ChatGPT causes deaths, tw: talk about suicides)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNBoULJkxoU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXRmGxudOC0Which is why it should only be used for art.
I don’t believe the billionaire dream of robot slaves is going to work nearly as soon as they’re promising each other. They want us to buy into the dream without telling us that we’d never be able to afford a personal robot, they aren’t for us. They don’t want us to have them. The poors are slaves, they don’t get slaves. It’s all lies, we’re not part of the future we’re building for them.
should only be used for art
No, churning out uncanny valley slop built on mass IP theft ain’t it, either. Personally I think AI is best used for simulations and statistical models of engineering problems, where it can iteratively find optimized solutions faster and sometimes more accurately than humans. The focus on “generative AI” and LLMs trying to get computers to act like humans is incredibly pointless, IMO. Let computers do what computers are good at, and humans do what humans are good at.
LLMs are an incredible interface to other systems. Why learn a new system language to get information’s when you can use natural language to ask and the AI will translate into the system language and do the lookup for you and then translate the result into natural language again. The important part is, the AI never gives an answer to your question itself, it just translates between human language and system language.
Use it as a language machine and never as a knowledge machine!
It shouldn’t be used for art, hire an artist or learn to make it yourself.
I mean, he asked if it can be eaten not what the effects of eating it are. 😅
Exactly, because a person can eat batteries and rocks if they so choose, which means those things are edible.
Secondly, the amanita muscaria pictured has been repeatedly consumed throughout history (most notably by viking raiders who were looking to get their raping and plundering done in “berserk” mode, with only fuzzy memories afterwards of whether all that shit really happened or not)
I think the more precise question would be “is this object ‘comestible’, ‘digestable’, or able to be survived if eaten”
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 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.
If it costs more than the benefit then it isn’t even useful.
I know nothing about stacking elk, though I’m sure it’s easier if you sedate them first. But yeah, common sense and a healthy dose of skepticism seems like the way to go!
Yeah, you just have to practice a little skepticism.
I don’t know what its actual error rate is, but if we say hypothetically that it gives bad info 5% the time: you wouldn’t want a calculator or an encyclopedia that was wrong that often, but you would really value an advisor that pointed you toward the right info 95% of the time.
I think DeepMind proved in 2022 that it would never reach 95% accuracy to human input even with infinite power and training data, as a response to the OpenAI research paper with similar findings that accurately predicted the performance of each new model after the paper was published.
5% error rate is being very generous, and unlike a human, it won’t ever say “I’m not sure if that’s correct.”
Considering the insane amount of resources AI takes, and the fact it’s probably ruining the research and writing skills of an entire generation, I’m not so sure it’s a good thing, not to mention the implications it also has for mass surveillance and deepfakes.
Sounds more actively harmful than useful to me.
When it works it can save time automating annoying tasks.
The problem is “when it works”. It’s like having to do code reviews mid work every time the dumb machine does something.
So it causes more harm or loss than benefit. So it’s not useful.
“When it works” it creates the need for oversight because “when it doesn’t work” it creates massive liabilities.
I’m not disagreeing lol.
I bring it up to explain why losers are obsessed with it.
Is it useful yet? I’m impressed how far its come, but have yet to find a use for it.
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.
Don’t rely on it for anything
FTFY
