AI-assisted mushroom hunting is a recipe for a bad trip
Even the best model gets fungus identification right just 65% of the time - talk about a false friend
If you see a mushroom in the forest and you're wondering if it's safe to eat or poisonous, don't ask an AI.
Polish software engineer Piotr Migdał, a founding engineer at AI analytics and cost analysis firm Quesma, explained in a Wednesday blog post why trusting the mushroom insights of leading AI models is a dubious, potentially life-threatening idea in an experiment he ran. Armed with a dataset of Danish mushrooms and additional information about safe and deadly species in Poland and abroad, he tested everything from ChatGPT to Qwen to see which gave the most reliable advice.
It likely won’t surprise you to learn that none of them are worth trusting with your life.
A total of 55 mushroom species were included in the safe and deadly datasets, which he...
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