We have been dealing with the buzz of AI and how artificial intelligence can change our lives for over a year now. We have been worried about how it can end up replacing jobs, what it implies to drive cars autonomously, and even the Terminator’s Skynet has been used as a scaremongering excuse. We had not realized that the biggest danger we faced was the photos of mushrooms that appear on Google through its search engine.
As with almost any other field of life in the image generation, the internet has been filled with realistic photos simulating mushrooms and fungi with its particular view of the world, but this time misinformation according to experts can have “devastating consequences.” The fact that Google is indexing these AI-generated images as if they were real is a problem.
AI-generated mushrooms are a health risk
Science has cataloged approximately 600,000 different species of mushrooms and, of all of them, only about 600 fungi are edible. The rest, to a greater or lesser extent, are not recommended for human consumption, but we do know that several hundred species are poisonous and, in the worst case, can be fatal to our organism.
The problem is that, in search of the immediacy that wakes up our daily lives, a quick search on Google or the use of its information search through photos that serve as reference, can lead an inexperienced person to end up consuming one of the species that they should not, thinking that they are completely safe.
Given the need to create algorithms that can distinguish between what is real and what is generated by artificial intelligence, many applications rely on bots that use Google hoping for some reliability in their results, which further complicates an already complex situation.
For example, the controversy of AI-generated mushrooms was recently the subject of debate after the publication of a mushroom identification book on Amazon created with artificial intelligence that listed and made up both the mushroom images shown in it and their characteristics.
Image | Hans Veth
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