Machine Learning

It's always okay to suggest using Google Lens for mushroom foraging to a republican

Hell, doesn’t really work in temperate zones ether to be honest. It gets common house/yard plants well but if you go into actual wild-ish areas it will give you 5 different answers from five different angles of the same plant.

I downloaded google lense a while back to identify a mushroom. It was pretty and I was curious. After installing and taking the picture it replied.... "Mushroom."

The second image said false widow's death wish or something metal as hell.
- I would literally code it to identify every mushroom as a destroying angel or some such. Not worth the liability.
- Yah, mushrooms are not that hard to identify if you know what to look for. I worry people who do not know what to look for will be far too confident with such an imperfect tool.
  
  Especially with the growth of demand for foraged mushrooms in restaurants and supermarkets. It’s big money, and I have no doubt some “enterprising” people are going to get people hurt by trusting these tools too much.
And it would be less of a problem if it showed all options that are likely, instead of just the one it thinks is most likely.

“Haha Google says this is safe, I’ll try it”

“Why is my entire skin numb”

Same here for the southern hemisphere. Google lens has no clue.

How does Plantnet fare in tropics?

I mean its just a matter of total available data points. The more images people take and upload, the more material they have to train their models. And obviously there will be way less people running around the tropics taking pictures.
- It’s honestly way more about plant diversity. There are a million different plants in like a ten square mile area that all look exactly like an aloe and are related. The only way to differentiate them is by hyper obscure differences like their root structure and what their sap consists of.
  
  You don’t even need to be in the proper tropics. Walk around San Diego with a plant id app and watch it spit out a different name for the same palm tree over and over because there are actually hundreds of varietals of palm with similar extremely complex identification processes. Some with toxic fruit and some with edible fruit that look the same.
From my experience it's quite good in the Caribbean and it's getting better.
- Cool, thanks for the info!

Try iNaturalist, it works pretty well. Also, learn plant morphology, makes it easier to narrow things down when you get a couple suggestions within the same genus or family.

As someone who uses iNaturalist and has a plant friend, I can confirm.
using inaturalist and uploading your observations also contributes to science :)
Indeed, basic plant morphology knowledge plus some local Floras and iNaturalist worked out quite well for me in the tropics. There are also so many people that know plants on iNat. You only get into trouble if you try to ID rare species, but that's also the case in the temperate zones.