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Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
- stared 15d agoRepo for reproducible science: https://github.com/stared/mushroom-hunting-llm-bench https://github.com/stared/mushroom-hunting-llm-bench
- Insanity 15d agoTrusting an LLM with a decision that can potentially be fatal is a good Darwin test I suppose. Sadly I don’t think the general populace understands that LLMs are unreliable. (And even people in tech can vastly overestimate the capabilities.. at least judging by the insane spending on them).
- rspeele 15d ago> ...even people in tech can vastly overestimate the capabilities... I think people in (software) tech are currently more prone to overestimate the capabilities, because LLMs in a harness are genuinely excellent at programming. Programming is the perfect LLM task since 1. it's symbolic manipulation, 2. there is a vast corpus of high quality training data, and 3. most mistakes can be harmlessly caught at compile-time or unit-test-time. Especially point 3 makes it so that just throwing more "effort" at a problem, something the machine is endlessly willing to do, virtually guarantees an improved result. In contrast there is no way for the machine to write a unit test to double-check its work when what it's offering the user is a legal document, or a medical diagnosis, or a recommendation of "yep that mushroom is safe to eat". I've often seen the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" referenced with respect to LLMs. It is said that most people can tell the LLM is not great at their own subject of expertise, yet they still trust it for other subjects where they can't personally assess the quality of its answers. Imagine how bad this is when the LLM actually is great at the thing you have expertise in.
- atopia 15d agothe interesting question is: what is the barrier we need to cross to trust LLMs with stuff like this? we'll probably cross the barrier but I'd have a hard time setting a true percentage success boundary
- optimalsolver 15d agoWe'll cross it around the same time we hand over nuclear reactor and airplane control systems to LLMs.
- stymaar 15d agoI guess if you had a billion dollar you could assemble an ML team and fine-tune a frontier LLM specifically for that purpose through RL, and it could work better than your local pharmacologist, but I doubt anyone would bother doing that. So it will probably come long after airplanes actually.
- nkrisc 15d agoAround the same time the LLM also faces an existential risk when its advice is wrong. Not trusting my life to an “intelligence” that has nothing to lose.
- altcognito 15d agoSometimes the things that people say, says more about themselves than the thing they said. If the only reason you give advice is predicated on the transactional value of that action, I think you've given up on acting ethically. While to some extent we all are motivated by some abstract transactional value, I think immediately perceiving and reducing everything to a surivivalist, transactional mentality is an empty, cynical existence.
- nkrisc 15d ago> If the only reason you give advice is predicated on the transactional value of that action, I think you've given up on acting ethically. I said nothing of the sort. Let me give a different example: I would not ride on a plane being flown remotely by a pilot on the ground. But I will ride on a plane with the pilots aboard. I do not necessarily believe the remote pilot would intentionally endanger me, but at the same time they are not facing mortal peril if they screw up. So I would need some other reason to trust them (maybe the remote pilot is a family member). An AI has nothing to lose for misidentifying a mushroom, and I have my life to lose by trusting it. It can’t even fear for my life on my behalf.
- khazhoux 15d agoI think the more important question is: have people really run out of interesting flavors at their local stores and restaurants, that they are so obsessed with eating things they find growing on the ground? I’ll never understand mushroom culture.
- KineticLensman 15d agoI’ve been at a locals’ restaurant in Italy where the chef had sourced some truffles from a nearby wood. They were better than anything he could have got from a store
- _whiteCaps_ 15d agoSome mushrooms like chanterelles can't be reliably farmed, and are quite tasty! I love being able to spend a day hiking and coming back with a meal.
- zikduruqe 15d agoMorels are starting to make good progress in being farmed. But, I still enjoy the hunt every spring.
- _whiteCaps_ 15d agoThey're still on my bucket list to find. Lots of false morels around here. :(
- zikduruqe 15d agoMaybe checkout morels.com forums next spring to gather some intel on the conditions.
- literalAardvark 15d agoYou can't really understand until you've tasted choice mushrooms, the only one of which is findable in stores is the bolete, and even that's usually dry and tells terrible quality. I used to go in the forest and find maybe 5 types of really tasty mushrooms, come back with enough for the whole family. Add some cheese and some onions and it's Michelin star in the mountains.
- _whiteCaps_ 15d agoConsidering that some mushrooms need a spore print to tell them apart, I'd say that you can't ever trust an LLM.
- Legend2440 15d agoIs it possible to reliably (>99%) identify mushrooms from a single image, with any method? All image datasets have an intrinsic minimum error that comes from the limit of information in the data, regardless of what model or method you use to analyze it. You might not be able to tell apart two similar-looking mushroom species just by looking.
- Sharlin 15d agoNo. At the very least you need a photo of both the upper side of the cap and the gills.
- engineer_22 15d agomany species of mushroom cant be identified just by looking, spore print is a necessary differentiator for many species, and as the article notes, for some species DNA sequencing is the only way to be sure.
- chis 15d agoCertainly it's not possible, yeah. A better test might be to have the AI report either confirmed good, confirmed toxic, or unknown. Even an experienced mushroom hunter needs to humbly put many mushrooms into the "unknown" category.
- deadbabe 15d agoGiving the impossibly high standards people here have for identifying a mushroom, it’s a wonder that they would eat a mushroom at all. You may not trust an LLM, but how would you even trust yourself? Who would you ever trust?
- xandrius 5d agoMicologist with a microscope?
- recursive 15d agoSomeone who your estate can sue and get a settlement of a dollar value equal to your own estimation of your future life's worth?
- zamadatix 15d agoWhy would you want to eat a random wild mushroom so badly in the first place? We're not starving, wandering through the forest for anything which might be edible. Entire regulated industries exist around selling and growing human food grade mushrooms. Curiosity is great. Take a picture, enjoy what you find in nature. At the same time, stay safe and resist the urge to throw a random mushroom down your throat just because you might be able to unless you're willing to put the work in to make doing so reasonably safe. If you do reaaaaallly want to try a mushroom you can't find for consumption otherwise then it's worth the heavy amount of verification. 99.9999% of mushrooms people normally care about eating can more easily be found without foraging and self-identifying though.
- Sharlin 15d agoI don’t anyone here has indicated that they have "impossible" standards. If you think "gather only mushrooms that you definitely recognize as edible; if you have any doubts, leave it be" is impossibly high, I’m not sure what to say. Of course what "definitely recognize" means in terms of the odds of a false positive is subjective, so sometimes people get poisoned. Even more rarely a poisoning leads to death, but people who die from mushrooms they have picked are those who didn’t heed the warning at all. Mushrooms are best treated like firearms; that’s not an impossibly high standard.
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- calldacopsidgaf 15d agoLove this idea. We should encourage every AI enthusiast to eat wild mushrooms using their sycophantic bullshit machine to determine each one's safety. Who benefits? Society
- eddieroger 15d agoDid you read the post or just decide to advertise your dislike of AI by wishing ill on others?
- calldacopsidgaf 15d agoBoth :) happy hunting!
- asveikau 15d agoI actually find AI-based plant and mushroom identifiers very interesting. They make being curious about such things as a beginner or layperson more accessible, and you learn some patterns. However it's very obvious that you shouldn't rely on them to decide what to put in your body. All those apps that I have seen (I guess the responsible ones?) will warn you not to do it. That's not what it's for.
- zikduruqe 15d agoThere are old mushroom hunters, and there are bold mushroom hunters. There are no old bold mushroom hunters.
- RattlesnakeJake 15d agoGotta' love it when a possible answer to an LLM-related question is "Death."
- WarmWash 15d agoI've used Gemini quiet a bit for foraging. It's definitely a "trust, but verify" situation. It's really good at at least getting you in the right lane to verify, rather than having to comb hundreds of pictures. So even if it's wrong, a short verification usually reveals why it was wrong. I haven't had a situation yet where it was catastrophically wrong (i.e. the mushroom it called out looks nothing like the mushroom imaged). It also will generally warn of lookalikes. I also use it a lot for general plant ID, and it's really impressive there too, with much lower stakes (I'm not eating those).
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- julienchastang 15d agoHa! I just had a very interesting conversation with ChatGPT about a mushroom that I found in my front lawn. I am 99% sure it was an edible oyster mushroom which included analysis the of the size, growing substrate (dead ash tree root which turns out to be a useful identifying characteristic -- I learned a lot about mycology in a short time). Plus I don't use fertilizers, herbicide, pesticides, fungicides (obviously) on my lawn so I think it would have been quite tasty. Did I eat it? Hell, no. But then I got to thinking, would I trust a human to correctly identify it? I am actually not sure I would either. Penalty is just too great for misidentification LLM or not.
- engineer_22 15d agooysters are pretty safe
- Insanity 15d agoYes but you need to be sure it is an Oyster Mushroom in the first place.
- engineer_22 13d agoRight, which isn't tough, it's a pretty safe mushroom to forage.
- xandrius 15d agoGreat stereotypical engineer's response.
- engineer_22 13d agoHow is that?
- Obscurity4340 15d agoI mean, there's a reason the Old Testament banned them. Blech
- kwarcode 15d agoNobody ever mentions the fox piss.
- theseamusjames 15d agoThere's been a spike in cases of people eating death cap mushrooms in California this year, and I would bet almost anything that LLM adoption has something to do with it.
- mike978 15d agoThey look like the Asian Paddy Straw Mushrooms, so people used to collecting those, being new to the area and not knowing about the Death Cap run afoul of it. The San Francisco Chronicle often has stories about this after it rains.
- tk781 15d agoWhat are the error rates for a human experienced/trained in spotting mushrooms? (isn't that the standard proponents use for autonomous driving?)
- eptcyka 15d agoI never touch a mushroom I am not 100% certain is safe. So far I’ve had a 100% success rate in not poisoning myself or others. Wouldn’t recommend trusting an LLM either.
- matusp 15d agoMushroom pickers generally know only a handful of easy to distinguish types and only pick those. I would say that 99.9% of pickers will never get poisoned.
- ortusdux 15d agoChanterelles and false chanterelles are especially tricky. They fruit at the same time in the same areas. I have to do a 2nd pass after I have washed and dried my haul. https://www.mushroom-appreciation.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/2.jpg https://www.mushroom-appreciation.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
- superjan 15d agoThe false chanterelle that I know is not poisonous.
- ortusdux 15d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygrophoropsis_aurantiaca#Edibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygrophoropsis_aurantiaca#Edib... The real thing is plentiful enough I don't mess with them, but I know people that regularly eat the false ones.
- allan-a 15d agoDo the false chanterelles that you encounter smell similar to chanterelles?
- behole 15d agoI have been using "new" Siri on iOS similarly but less dangerously. Pointing my camera at dogs at the dog park and seeing how well Siri identifies them. Pretty impressed so far. I am not eating them tho.
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- soricus 15d agoThe check can't be just a fast glance because an incorrect answer for sure looks exactly the same as a correct one. From my experience a separate pass with verification of the source is required.
- dataviz1000 15d agoThe single best animated data visualization to demonstrate the stochastic nature of LLM models: an animation of the probability of solving a long multiplication problem over several runs. [0] [0] https://adamsohn.com/reasoning-grid/#walk-the-surface https://adamsohn.com/reasoning-grid/#walk-the-surface
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- levelZero 15d agoGemini 3.8 flash told me to eat Entoloma sinuatum!
- josefritzishere 15d agoLLMS ARE NON-DETERMINISTIC. DO NOT TRUST THEM WITH LIFE OR DEATH DECISIONS! Seriously, you could die of a near-optimal solution.
- krapp 15d agoHumanity is in its "fuck around" phase with LLMs and is going to fly headlong into "find out" soon.
- jwilk 15d agoThe lack or determinism is irrelevant. It's trivial to make an LLM deterministic (certianly much easier than to make a human deterministic!), but that wouldn't make it any more trustworthy.
- josefritzishere 15d agoWhen you are ingesting potential toxins determinism is crucial. You have a random chance of dying. Facts matter.
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