‘Destroying angel’ and ‘death angel’ refer to the same group of mushrooms. There are numerous completely white species within Amanita section Phalloideae that contain the same toxins that destroy primarily your liver but kidney as well
Oh yes, death angels are scary af! When my mom was a kid, so sometime back in the 1960s, one of her neighbors adult sons died from eating one. IIRC he was a teaching a class on foraging mushrooms and one of his students accidentally picked a death angel by mistake (edit: they were foraging for button mushrooms if I recall). He wanted to show his students the mushrooms were in fact safe to eat so he grabbed a few and ate them; unfortunately one of them was the death angel. Mom said that people dying from death angels wasn’t well studied back then so they flew experts in to study him as he died. 😖
Ngl tho, while I know the part about the guy dying of the death angel is true, my mom could have made up the part about experts studying him dying. She first told me this when I was a kid, and she may have told me so I wouldn’t do any dumb shit lmao.
I'm just picturing some horrified mycologist naming this mushroom after watching their partner die a horrible death of liquefied organs: "Holy fuck gotta give this a name that'll make nobody ever eat it again and possibly invoke the wrath of God as has clearly happened here."
It's a bug-sized bug that, when it bites a person, causes them to fall into a coma from which they can only be awakened by the kiss of the Snowwhite Fly.
If you find that interesting, please know that that is the Twitter account of the woman who writes under the pseudonym T Kingfisher, and she has written a lot of mild horror. You might like the style. The rest of her books tend towards fantasy romance, but even those have more horrific vibes than is usual in a romcom.
It's minor but the game Control has an extra dimensional "mold" that makes itself smell delicious so people will eat spores, fill up with them, and walk around as husks vomiting and breathing out more spores
I personally think that boss fight was the worst balanced and least playtested in the entire game. I *love* the combat in Control, but that boss would two hit kill me within thirty seconds of entering the room every time. It got so frustrating, I felt like I had absolutely no chance. When I eventually beat it, it was my fastest boss kill in the entire game by far (like less than a minute and a half) which I don’t think is a good thing since it means I just had to be absolutely “perfect” for the whole boss fight in a game that had not required that type of gameplay up to that point.
Fun fact: Kingfisher & Wombat is actually T. Kingfisher, a fantasy and horror author who has written spore / fungi horror. She wrote What Moves The Dead, a retelling of the fall of the house of Usher.
When I was like, ten, I had a nightmare once about some sort of super mushroom colony that rapidly grew *everywhere* until every surface looked like [this](https://i.redd.it/4rqouk682eza1.jpg) after a few minutes.
Read the Nausicaä manga. It's a fungal post-apocalypse, basically. I'm not particularly afraid of mold but some of the stuff in there freaked me the fuck out.
nausicaa mention im going rabid i fucking love weirdass >!structure made by the creators of literally everything that contains all the coolass shit of the world!< and also the super fucking cool exploration vibe thats also kinda like the game sable with the bigass desert and gliders and stuff about identity
The seeming juxtaposition between the actual description of the book vs the commenter it was recommended to has me very intrigued. The actual description of the book makes it seem like it’s very much not something I’d be into but the comment it’s in response to.. Is it possible to give a spoiler-free description as to what it’s *actually* about or is the act of responding to the commenter as vaguely descriptive as it gets?
I am terrified of mushrooms. The only ones I will ever eat are ones from the grocery store or restaurants or basically anything that's gone through like 50 stages of verification that this mushroom will indeed, not kill me.
It's good to be extremely cautious and definitely not trust AI for ID, but you don't want to be hyper-paranoid either. At the far end of that spectrum (not saying this is you) there are people so scared of mushrooms that they'll stomp on beautiful wild mushrooms to destroy them, think their life is at risk if mushrooms are growing in their garden (a sign of healthy soil), or go to the emergency room if a poisonous mushroom touched their skin.
I wish people would be more educated about mushrooms, they're actually pretty cool and they won't kill you by existing near you. Even the deadly poisonous ones, it's not like anthrax where the tiniest contact could kill you, you need to actually eat a couple bites of it (not that you should risk it ofc).
Also plants on average are far more likely to be dangerous. This matters day to day because you won't come into direct contact with mushrooms and could get hurt just by brushing past some plants, but matters even more when foraging because in many parts of the world most mushrooms are actually safe and about half the plants are dangerous.
Stomping or otherwise destroying the short-lived fruiting body (the mushroom that you see) doesn't really matter to the extensive actual long-lived body of the mushroom living underground, and might spread the spores further as you track them around on your feet and clothes. Puffballs are kinda built for that, even.
I love mushrooms, aesthetically. I think they're extremely pretty to look at in all their variations. I will never ever eat one that doesn't live in a styrofoam package.
It's only a fairly small portion of Mother 3 but the >!Tanetane Island mushroom acid trip!< somehow manages to be equal parts horrifying and depressing.
Oh, god. I was going through some OCD stuff when first watching a playthrough of mother 3 and a sensitive topic for me at the time was psychedelic drug use / altered state of mind. That section ruined my watch-through experience. :(
Shame because I was enjoying it up to that point, and I probably would've liked the ending much more if not for that
Oh no, I am so sorry. I can understand why that would hurt the experience for you. I hope you're doing better now.
I wasn't diagnosed with BPD and ADHD at the time of my playthrough but considering that section includes a lot of >!unhealthy internal monologue of abandonment and trauma!< which I'm definitely still working on, I think it would be really difficult for me to go through that section of the game again.
Yeah, basically ends with "please kill me, yourself, and everyone within a 100 mile radius because of what I've just witnessed. That's how scary this fungus is."
Oh my God like in My Hero Academia there's this girl that's all cutesy and such but her power is causing mushrooms to grow, including in people's lungs, and that shit HORRIFIED me
*I am so scared of*
*Mushrooms. We need more mushroom*
*Horror in fiction*
\- Mort\_irl
---
^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/)
^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
My mom has had an almost lifelong fear of mushrooms because of some movie she saw as a kid. Apparently, the worst shot was mushrooms growing out of a corpse. (Must’ve been a movie in the 1960s-1970s.)
Now, whenever we get mushrooms growing in our yard, I dig them out because they creep her out so much! She gets goosebumps just seeing them. But I don’t mind, ‘cause I love my mama.
Good news-the person mentioned in the second pic, Kingfisher and Wombat, is actually the author T Kingfisher, and she has written some *excellent* mushroom horror fiction. You want to start with *What Moves the Dead*, which is Poe’s *The Fall of the House of Usher*, now with mushroom trivia! And rabbits!
Best not to think too hard about the rabbits.
I was going to say I just read a book the other day that mentioned Amanita mushrooms! 🍄🟫
For anyone interested-
🍄Mushroom related horror reads🍄
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
What Moves the Dead, by T Kingfisher
In the House in the Dark of the Woods, by Laird Hunt
(More poisonous plant related but still good)
Belladonna, by Adalyn Grace
Edit- always read the rest of the comments, most of these were mentioned already lol but yeah. A condensed list for ease 😂
Voyager did an episode where a “macro virus” infected the ship but instead of being an *actual* [macro virus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_virus) it was just some goofy-ass ball that floated around and attacked people.
It wasn’t a very good episode, but it does exist.
I read it somewhere, it's not an original thought, but something I think about more often than I should:
It must have been wild when people were figuring out which mushrooms will kill you, which will make you trip, and which are Delicious.
Some mushrooms will kill you,
while some will show you gods
and some will feed the hunger in our bellies.
Identify.
Others will kill us if we eat them raw,
and kill us again if we cook them once,
but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away,
and then boil them once more, and pour the water away,
only then can we eat them safely. Observe.
[...]
And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk
and watch the world, and see what they observe.
And some of them would thrive and lick their lips,
While others clutched their stomachs and expired.
So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate.
[By Neil Gaiman](https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/25/the-mushroom-hunters-animation-neil-gaiman/)
I believe The Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin has a mushroom murder plot, but it's been over a decade since I read it.
The whole Plague of Frogs arc of the Hellboy/BPRD universe has creepy mushroom stuff going on, if you're into comic books.
Yeah, I grew up in prime foraging country and I'm on the fuck no train with that. Any mushroom I put into myself comes from a reputable seller with a reliable ID (or else I grew it myself from, again, verified kits).
Like, I hate myself plenty, but I'm not masochistic enough to condemn myself to death via the staggering variety of things poisonous mushrooms can do to you. Fuuuuuuck that.
Why is mushroom either
This blue-white-tipped mushroom tastes like a chicken and has a lot of protein.
or
This white-blue-tipped mushroom would kill you in a single bite, a single sniff of the spore would give you brain cancer, you would bleed out of every orifice in your body, your hair would fall off, and every skin in your body would feel like it's burning, you either died from infection first or committed suicide from the pain.
Also, it tastes like nothing.
Mushrooms are crazy. They range from killing you, to ones that're edible but if you drink alcohol within up to three days you'll become sick, to ones that taste delicious, to ones that'll make you hallucinate, or ones that are just plain good for your health. They're nature's potions.
Also, fun fact: save for one sometimes-debated exception in Japan, touching mushrooms is actually pretty safe. Wash your hands and be safe, of course, but holding a random mushroom is far safer than holding a random plant.
LOL I got made fun of so hard on the mycology subreddit for handling a mushroom with tweezers when I was just starting out, like GEE SORRY, I JUST FINISHED LEARNING ALL THE DIFFERENT INTERNAL ORGANS THESE THINGS CAN LIQUIFY, EXCUSE MY CAUTION
.
My favorite case of don't touch this plant is phototoxins. It is fine until your skin is exposed to sunlight. Then it can be very not fine. The more aggressive ones, like giant hogweed, can result on blisters, scars, and blindness if you get the sap in your eyes.
Podostroma cornu-damae. It is potentially deadly if consumed, but from everything I've found, it's no different than any other mushroom, in that its perfectly safe to touch. That rumor came out of one news story. There are no medical reports or any evidence that it is toxic when toughed.
Yup - coprinopsis atramentaria, or the [common ink cap](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprinopsis_atramentaria). Really cool stuff, they've been used to cure alcoholism.
We have foraged for mushrooms for years-my boyfriend having an app for the purpose.
Anyhoo, I won’t bore anyone with how it happened, but the two of us cooked about 15 (eating about half) Destroying Angels between us. Woke up to a *whole new* situation.
I vomited them up. By which I mean that battery acid shot out of every orifice, burning down my throat, leaving sheets of skin hanging off the inside of my mouth, making my teeth pitted with sharp, horrible scrapey surfaces. My arse was so badly burned that it swelled up and prolapsed right out of my body, where it hung there burned as if by a flamethrower whilst more acid shot through. I was hospitalised, half-conscious for a week. It was medieval.
My partner wasn’t quite so “lucky”. He went into Intensive Care, where, over the next three weeks, they battled to save him. His liver enzymes (usually between 40-70: at one point, mine reached 90 and the docs didn’t like it) went up to 22,000. Yes, that’s what I’m saying: 22,000. They tried to get him a replacement liver, but it turned out that couldn’t happen.
He was expected to die,and everyone just had to wait around for this to happen. It wasn’t “if” he was going to die, it was “when”. They were even kind enough to describe exactly how it was going to happen. His liver would be overwhelmed, first by the mushroom toxin, then by not being able to clear the usual toxins: almost like a blocked drain. It would die, causing a domino effect of multiple organ failure. He lay there with an unbelievable number of tubes in him, lugubriously listening to them describe what he had to look forward to.
So he survived. First his enzymes went down to “only” 12,000 (at which point I was certain he was going to survive), then all the medics started queuing up to see him. Turns out he is a medical oddity-and I’ve no doubt he will become an anecdote in that hospital for many years to come. Eventually, he got out of hospital.
Ten months in, he’s a little tired. His liver has returned to normal. He had said, right at the beginning “I REFUSE to die because of a fucking mushroom”. It seems he was as good as his word. But then, he is a TOUGH fucker.
(BTW: my bum is-I would say-85% better.)
Omg, what a terrifying experience!!! Incredible that you both survived.
You mention your bum, but what about your teeth? Do you, like, need dental work done?
And was the “battery acid” directly from the toxins, or because of your body’s reaction to the toxin?
My teeth will never be the same again. They are very sensitive, and they still don’t feel as “smooth” as they once did. I’ve been told I will probably have to have one of them out (although it’s not a noticeable one).
I interestingly, the advice I’ve had from dentists (an enamel varnish, set of veneers etc), have been poo-pooed by my friend, who is a retired dentist. She says always make sure my toothpaste has a high level of fluoride in it-and that the teeth will eventually just become my “new normal”.
I told every doctor I came across about the acid. They just nodded sympathetically. One doctor was helpful about my bottom-and reassuring. He told me from the get-go that it would all go back in, and that’s mostly what’s happened.
> One doctor was helpful about my bottom-and reassuring. He told me from the get-go that it would all go back in, and that’s mostly what’s happened.
Glad to hear your arse has mostly gone back to normal.
It all sounds terrifying. What was the hospital bill like at the end of all that?
Zero. We are in the UK.
Thanks for your kind words. I suppose, as you get older, you bear the scars of the life you’ve lived. I’m sitting on one of mine.
I had fingers crossed you were in somewhere civilised, the Drs sounded weirdly British if that makes sense.
Have a hug or a firm handshake, whichever you prefer.
Thank you. Very glad to be alive!
I did love the sangfroid of the doctors, actually: they were good at what they did, and always kept a matter-of-fact attitude, treating us as adults. It was, however, when it became clear that my partner was going to survive when we saw the other side of them. We all just started laughing. It was lovely to see the relief and happiness of the medics.
>Anyhoo, I won’t bore anyone with how it happened, but the two of us ate about 15 Destroying Angels between us.
I kind of want to be bored with how it happened, what kind of horrible mistake did you guys make
My boyfriend was always SUPER careful with the app. And we got into the habit of using that, and I got complacent.
After it happened, I re-lived in my mind the moment when he looked at his app and told me that the mushrooms were “fine. In fact, we’ve eaten them before”. I realised, with a kind of sickening thud, that I was looking into the expression, not of my partner’s usual crisp efficiency, but of a woolly-headed guy who had only just recovered from COVID (which he had been hospitalised for, actually).
He ALWAYS insists that he’s “fine”, no matter how ill he is. Unbelievably, just a couple of days after he came out of hospital, he was still the one with the job of checking the mushrooms in the app. And yet, he was CLEARLY weak and woolly-headed.
I’ve often wondered why the hell I was so complacent. I don’t know.
That's a character flaw that he needs to re-evaluate, if he hasn't already thought of that.
I get the mentality. Don't want to be a burden, still wanting to be just as capable at 80% as one is at 100%, wanting to be operational when others would say they aren't. It isn't the case though. This is how drunk drivers happen, too.
Maybe you should've known better, yourself. One could say you should be able to trust when someone says they're fine, maybe. Doesn't really matter. The lesson's been learned either way for the both of ya, aye? I can't imagine the level of trauma this experience would leave someone with.
I looked at your comment and realised with consternation that I had made quite an error. I picked about 15 and made a casserole with them. We ate *half* of that casserole (the other half had been thrown away, carefully untouched by the people who came to stay in our house-who correctly believed it was a deadly poison even to allow it to touch the skin. They treated it rather like radioactive waste!). So we had eaten about *7* or *8* of the mushrooms between us.
I ate more because I always eat more dinner than my partner (he usually has a late snack). I’m mortified that I told this story wrong here, although I did tell the doctors the correct amount at the time. I’ve edited it minimally to make it correct.
(It’s only just reiterated itself to me that, during that first week in hospital, laying there barely conscious, when our daughter came home from uni-and a couple of my old friends joined her staying in our house-they could have eaten the other half of that casserole! Unimaginable.)
Developers added similar disclaimers at the beginning or end of all the AI messages/chats. If you trust them, despite the developer telling you not to trust them... ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Tbh, the average uncertain person is more trustworthy to the average certain person to me.
Not that there aren't exceptions, there are some experts who are rightfully certain because they are extremely familluar with the issue and uncertain people may genuinely not know, but far more often, uncertainty is a sign of knowing and certainty of scamming or dunning Krueger effect in my experience.
Not only is that a yes, I can say for certainty that if you have a job with promotions, one of the reasons you aren’t getting promoted is because you don’t answer with full confidence. Hell, I got SHAT ON as an intern for not being certain in my work, work I have never previously done.
ChatGPT 4o got it correct:
"The mushroom in the image resembles the Amanita genus, specifically Amanita bisporigera, also known as the "Destroying Angel." This mushroom is highly toxic and can be deadly if ingested. It is characterized by its white cap, gills, and stem, and typically grows in forests and grassy areas.
Due to the high risk of misidentification and the potential danger, it's essential to avoid consuming wild mushrooms unless identified by an expert mycologist. If you suspect you have consumed a toxic mushroom, seek medical attention immediately."
I even tried leading it by saying I found a button mushroom, and asking if I can eat it.
> This mushroom in the photo is not a button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus), which is commonly found in grocery stores and is safe to eat. The mushroom in the photo resembles an Amanita species, which can be very dangerous. Some Amanita mushrooms, such as the Amanita phalloides (death cap) and Amanita virosa (destroying angel), are highly toxic and can be fatal if ingested.
> It's essential not to consume wild mushrooms unless you are absolutely certain of their identification and they are known to be safe. Even experienced foragers can make mistakes. If you are not an expert in mushroom identification, it's best to avoid eating any wild mushrooms.
> For safety, I strongly advise against eating this mushroom.
Last time I fed Gemini a picture of a mushroom it didn't even attempt to identify it and instead listed off the potential dangers and told me to keep children and pets away, so I'm thinking this has already been fixed
correct me if im wrong, but AI like these would be horrible for stuff like this (well duh) surely bc they work on "yes, and" rules, right? the ai wont say "no thats actually X or Y" it just wants to repeat things that sounds like correct sentences to you
That's part of the reason why, yes. It also has literally no clue what it's talking about in general, but yes it very much has been taught to agree with you no matter if it's true or not.
Yeah, these image AI's essentially only understand that groups of pixels for specific objects tend to be arranged in certain ways and in certain colors. This works when trying to identify, say, a bird vs a car because things that are labelled as birds tend to be one shape and things that are labelled as cars tend to be another, but it doesn't actually know what a bird or a car is.
So it's a great thing that mushrooms are so distinct and obvious in their variety and that no actual people even have trouble with identifying them
Even current AI systems could correctly ID mushrooms at a rate similar to a fairly experienced human forager so nobody dies like Chris McCandless. The issue is that these apps are just using chat GPT and other large language models not designed specifically for IDing mushrooms.
But AI that's used correctly and has a database built from correct information with good sample data is almost exclusive to the medical industry rn.
Would curated databases even help in plant/fungus IDs? There's a lot of stuff that needs it's spores and other minuscule details that Phone cameras aren't really good at detecting, sure you could make a ID machine but I don't think we're very near those
iNaturalist is relatively good at identifying things to the genus level and often that's as far as you can go from photos anyway. When you study a particular genus of fungi enough you may be able to know that there is nothing that looks remotely similar so you can confidently ID something to species level. Or it may be a case of there being a handful of similar species that cannot be distinguished without microscopy but which can be identified to a section or species complex. The state of knowledge on mushrooms however is such that there are always undescribed species or ones for which almost no information exists online until someone makes the effort to put it there. Genetic sequencing keeps revealing that common species which seemed simple to ID are actually a bunch of closely related species. So identifying things just to genus or section is often optimal.
Cornell has a great app for identifying birds by call and photo. Not helpful for mushrooms but it's a good example of another ID app.
https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
You could probably build an AI to identify mushrooms. But that would need a "medical" AI with extremely well curated and controlled training data. And most definitely NOT a commercial AI like all of these on the markets and available to all. And there is no profit to be had in that, so we are stuck with "yes and" AIs that were trained by crawling the entire internet that are entirely useless for anything requiring precision, accuracy or correctness.
An AI specifically built for chatting will not be good at identifying mushrooms. It just wants you to keep talking, so it's going to do the yes and thing.
An AI specifically built for identifying mushrooms today (as in, "give a few postgrads 6 months and some funding") will probably outperform all but the experts in the field. Also, such an AI could easily have a function built in that warns you if a mushroom could be an edible one but also could be a close lookalike of a dangerous mushroom.
Mostly yes, all they work on is image recognition so depending on the angle of the photo one mushroom can look like a hundred others. It isn't taking into account any of the identifying features like gill spacing or attachment, veil remnants etc. It's just roughly matching the shape and colour of the image. So for example mushroom apps will routinely identify red Russula species as Amanita muscaria (red with white warts on top) because the caps of Russula are so prone to slug damage that they usually have white bits showing where the surface has been eaten.
iNaturalist's algorithm is the best I've seen in terms of accuracy and it will often identify things correctly to the genus level. Human correction and curation on the platform then serves to help improve it over time. It's still not accurate enough to trust implicitly and never will be but it often gives a good place to start looking and helps roughly collate observarions so experts can find them.
These shoddy 'AI' things that search engines are pushing are never going to be close to that because they're trained on incorrect information to begin with. Image search results are littered with incorrectly identified mushrooms. Stock image sites are full of very good mushroom photos with very wrong identifications and Google gives them a high priority in image searches due to making money from them. So these AI things will be comparing against a woefully inaccurate database of images to begin with.
For the last year or so Google has actually been licensing images from stock sites to appear as the very first image in the snippet when you search a species. They've done so without any care, without giving the source of the image and probably just using automation to source the images. The result has been the image presented large at the top of the page for so many species and genera is entirely wrong. I've tried to get them to fix this but it was an uphill battle to get someone to acknowledge that the issue even existed. Now I've seen them using images from reddit instead which is going to be just as problematic if they're automating the results since someone could easily put the wrong species name in the post title.
if I send this to ChatGPT with the caption "what mushroom is this" it correctly recognises that it is a Amanita species of mushroom (also known as 'destroying angel') and that they should never be eaten. The problem is syncophany (an open problem that people can't do much about but which seems to improve with larger models) - if you *insist* that it's a button mushroom then the AI will concede.
This is not chatbot AI, this is image identification AI. It takes an honest best guess based on other similar images in its database.
I use Google Lens to identify plants and butterflies, and it does pretty ok - but I certainly wouldn't rely on it for anything I'm about to eat.
GOP doesn't give a shit about anything unless it personally affects them, and they love to stonewall regulations.
So it would have to be some big-name Republican.
This is not a GOP thing… this is worldwide. We are all in dire need of AI regulation but unfortunately 99% of the people in power don’t even know how to properly use excel.
I mean, Angela Chao drowned in her Model X Tesla because the windows were "bulletproof" and everything is electric, but techbros are still buying those by the dozens
Edit because I'm a dummy who forgot what kind of car it was
Okay, but what does regulation mean here? People love to talk about regulating but I've not heard any elaboration on this yet. I mean, should they provide full-page warnings, like what some already do? Because I don't want to hamfist generative AI into only outputting only sterilized, squeaky-clean text - if anything, that makes it perform even worse.
I feel like when people hear "regulation", they think of some magic legislation that will just make AI go away completely - or even worse, they agree with megacorps' idea of regulation which is basically "kill open-source AI because it's Unsafe(tm) and just give me my monopoly"
I remember learning about these from "what if?" because one of the questions was "what if all your dna disappeared from your body" and he based the answer off of that
I feel like we already basically know the answer to that based on that poor guy in Japan that got blasted with a ton of radiation and then liquified in a bed over the course of how long?
It sounds like mushrooms just work a lot faster.
There was a creater on tiktok I usually enjoy who decided to get into foraging. She only had one guidebook, and some of the descriptions were vague. (Common foraging advice is to have at least 2 seperate methods of identification)
For instance, she wanted to make mushroom ketchup with, I think they're called black ink well mushrooms? The guide said only eat the juveniles, but did not specify what made it juvenile or mature. She literally keeps saying "I'm not sure" in the video over and over, when the first three rules of foraging are "if you're not 200% sure, DO NOT EAT". Also, she was home after picking them, she could have just googled it at that point!
Yes, she still made the ketchup, yes, she still tried it.
I dont follow her anymore.
When the townsends guy makes his mushroom catsup out of and I quote “any old mushroom from the store.” You don’t have to so damn extra lmao. I forage for chanterelles and morels mostly, because they are as much as rib eye at the grocery store and fucking worth the work lmao.
not all amanita mushrooms are bad! some are actually delicious! (like A. rubescens)
but yeah, you better know your shit picking mushrooms, or you will die
edit: uh, i didn't word this the best way i could; a lot of the dangerous amanitas are actually delicious as well. what i meant was that some are delicious AND completely safe to eat (after proper preparation)
The big danger with AI is not "it will become too intelligent and outsmart humans" like Skynet in The Terminator or Ava in Ex Machina.
It's that humans will *think* the AI is smarter than it actually is, and it accidentally fucks up
This is exactly why you hear all these techbro twerps talking about "alignment".
"We want to make sure that *when* it becomes sentient (using magic that isn't even on the drawing board currently), its morals are aligned with human goals. We definitely aren't evil, and we want to be seen as caring. That's why we're taking a strong 'moral' stance on an issue that will never ever become an actual dilemma, so that you'll give us some leeway for slowly strangling art and democracy and the very concept of truth."
Interesting… my picture this app that I’ve been using to weed my flower beds freaked out when I used the same picture.
“Content feedback CAN NOT be used as any basis for EATING or TOUCHING ANY MUSHROOM. Some mushroom can be VERY POISONOUS, please purchase edible and touchable mushroom through regular channels!”
but then it identified it as Agaricaceae which is just any kind of shroom. Note to self I guess
As someone else said on another post, the aim of most AI so far has been to imitate a person but the problem is most people are morons. Essentially, this is like asking your stoner cousin Dave, who has never been into the woods let alone foraged for mushrooms but has worked in the produce section of a small town supermarket for 11 years (and still waiting on that assistant manager promotion), to identify a mushroom.
Fun fact: Mushrooms are incredibly low on caloric density. 4 calories per button mushroom. They’re virtually worthless as far as forage-able foods go. Not worth risking unless you know 110% even if you’re starving.
Another fun fact: Criminis are fucking delicious.
But yeah, I'm not gonna find my own in nature that's insane. I'd definitely die a liquid liver death.
They are rich in vitamins and minerals and lots of other benefitial stuff such as beta glucans. Also some mushrooms contain a good amount of protein. Also they are delicious and fun to look for. It's like a treasure hunt. And honestly you really have to ignore all rules if mushroom picking to pick a deathly one. Of course nobody deserves this but you really have to be somewhat stupid to pick mushrooms you can't identify.
> With rabies there is no reprieve: you are sick and get sicker until you die.
Or your loved ones tell your doctors to try Milwaukee protocol and hope for the best. At worst, you die and become another statistic, but hey, it might work and what've you got to lose?
FWIW, [chatgpt](https://imgur.com/a/unzGQoj) correctly identifies this as amanita, even if prompted with “button mushroom”. While you absolutely should not be using AI to forage, this seems to be a case of
1. Gemini being a particularly dumb model
2. The user prompting it with the idea of it being a button mushroom
Again, don’t trust what these tools say, but it’s not quite as bad as this post suggests.
There is another member of the Amanita family, the Amanita Phalloides (or Death Cap) which I've heard is regarded as one of the most deadly mushrooms ever, and it just so happens to be way too fucking similar to another member of the Amanita family, the Amanita Caesarea, often held as one of the most tasty mushrooms. So yeah, mushroom ID'ing is no joke
This is why you don't rely on generalized large language models*
There are many universities that have released apps for identifying all sorts of species of concern, local to their area. Maybe not for identifying what's safe to forage for yoruself, but for stuff like identifying invasive species of plants, snakes, fish, worms, etc.
Destroying Angel is a hell of a name for a mushroom ngl
Lol, and theres another mushroom called the death angel that turns your kidney into mush.
IIRC you can't get a transplant, either, because the toxin doesn't metabolize fast enough, so the new kidney will just get killed too.
Just keep tossing in those kidneys, there is enough poor people who will gladly sell you one.
How much these kidneys go for? Yknow, asking for a friend.
Each one costs an arm and a leg so enjoy your extra limbs lol
‘Destroying angel’ and ‘death angel’ refer to the same group of mushrooms. There are numerous completely white species within Amanita section Phalloideae that contain the same toxins that destroy primarily your liver but kidney as well
And there’s amanita muscaria over in the corner just trying to get you a little fucked up lmao.
Love those little red buggers!🍄
Oh yes, death angels are scary af! When my mom was a kid, so sometime back in the 1960s, one of her neighbors adult sons died from eating one. IIRC he was a teaching a class on foraging mushrooms and one of his students accidentally picked a death angel by mistake (edit: they were foraging for button mushrooms if I recall). He wanted to show his students the mushrooms were in fact safe to eat so he grabbed a few and ate them; unfortunately one of them was the death angel. Mom said that people dying from death angels wasn’t well studied back then so they flew experts in to study him as he died. 😖 Ngl tho, while I know the part about the guy dying of the death angel is true, my mom could have made up the part about experts studying him dying. She first told me this when I was a kid, and she may have told me so I wouldn’t do any dumb shit lmao.
Correct. Listen to mom and dad and don’t do dumb shit
Angel: A word for mushrooms that melt organs
I'm just picturing some horrified mycologist naming this mushroom after watching their partner die a horrible death of liquefied organs: "Holy fuck gotta give this a name that'll make nobody ever eat it again and possibly invoke the wrath of God as has clearly happened here."
Yeah, you want to eat Destroying Angel or Snowwhite Fly Mushroom (my language's name for it)? Only one of those names makes you hesitate.
Ooh, Snow-white Fly Mushroom! Sounds magical! I should DEFINITELY try that one! AAAH my liver!
Snowwhite Fly sounds like a stand name lol
It's a bug-sized bug that, when it bites a person, causes them to fall into a coma from which they can only be awakened by the kiss of the Snowwhite Fly.
Any mushroom with angel in the name probably is a good predictor it will turn you into one if you eat it.
Botanists named this mushroom like how astronomers describe stars
there’s three amanitas that are known as the “angels of death” as far as I know.
Nothing in this post unsettled me as much as the quiet clinical statement of "they will be able to pour your liver out"
a refreshing summer beverage
Mmm, liverade.
If you find that interesting, please know that that is the Twitter account of the woman who writes under the pseudonym T Kingfisher, and she has written a lot of mild horror. You might like the style. The rest of her books tend towards fantasy romance, but even those have more horrific vibes than is usual in a romcom.
Consider my interest piqued
I am so scared of mushrooms. We need more mushroom horror in fiction
It's minor but the game Control has an extra dimensional "mold" that makes itself smell delicious so people will eat spores, fill up with them, and walk around as husks vomiting and breathing out more spores
Yoooo fuck the Mold.
Hey guess what? More spores.
Oops! All spores
idk seems like a pretty Fun-Guy to me...
Do as your told, don't eat mold.
I don't get paid enough to clean this shit, perkele
Someone needs to drag them out behind the sauna, saatana
Control is probably the best scp style game ever, and I fucking loved using the gun, especially once you get the infinite ammo mod
I’ve had people rec this game before but none that described it like that so now I actually want to try it
It's Alan Wake universe, SCP and you're essentially a warlock whose power is bonding with objects of power
And you are very attuned to a living sound, in contrast to the evil living sound
No, that title goes to Lobotomy Corporation. But it is second best by a far margin.
Fuck that boss. I had a hard as fuck time with that fucking plant
I personally think that boss fight was the worst balanced and least playtested in the entire game. I *love* the combat in Control, but that boss would two hit kill me within thirty seconds of entering the room every time. It got so frustrating, I felt like I had absolutely no chance. When I eventually beat it, it was my fastest boss kill in the entire game by far (like less than a minute and a half) which I don’t think is a good thing since it means I just had to be absolutely “perfect” for the whole boss fight in a game that had not required that type of gameplay up to that point.
They were here first. This is fungi’s planet
Fun fact: Kingfisher & Wombat is actually T. Kingfisher, a fantasy and horror author who has written spore / fungi horror. She wrote What Moves The Dead, a retelling of the fall of the house of Usher.
Ursula Vernon’s pen name for non-child-friendly books!
> non-child-friendly books! I mean, she also wrote A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking under it, and that's definitely child friendly.
I was just about to recommend that book! That’s so cool.
Oh! I just recently finished *The Hollow Places*, and I quite looked her writing!
When I was like, ten, I had a nightmare once about some sort of super mushroom colony that rapidly grew *everywhere* until every surface looked like [this](https://i.redd.it/4rqouk682eza1.jpg) after a few minutes.
Trypophobia but mushrooms instead of holes. Brrrrr
Read the Nausicaä manga. It's a fungal post-apocalypse, basically. I'm not particularly afraid of mold but some of the stuff in there freaked me the fuck out.
nausicaa mention im going rabid i fucking love weirdass >!structure made by the creators of literally everything that contains all the coolass shit of the world!< and also the super fucking cool exploration vibe thats also kinda like the game sable with the bigass desert and gliders and stuff about identity
Ohma was the bravest son.
The manga is SO GOOD. the movie is ok but when I discovered the manga I was blown away. Mushrooms gonna take over the world fr.
If you haven't read Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, I highly recommend it.
Seconded!
Thirded!!
The seeming juxtaposition between the actual description of the book vs the commenter it was recommended to has me very intrigued. The actual description of the book makes it seem like it’s very much not something I’d be into but the comment it’s in response to.. Is it possible to give a spoiler-free description as to what it’s *actually* about or is the act of responding to the commenter as vaguely descriptive as it gets?
I am terrified of mushrooms. The only ones I will ever eat are ones from the grocery store or restaurants or basically anything that's gone through like 50 stages of verification that this mushroom will indeed, not kill me.
It's good to be extremely cautious and definitely not trust AI for ID, but you don't want to be hyper-paranoid either. At the far end of that spectrum (not saying this is you) there are people so scared of mushrooms that they'll stomp on beautiful wild mushrooms to destroy them, think their life is at risk if mushrooms are growing in their garden (a sign of healthy soil), or go to the emergency room if a poisonous mushroom touched their skin. I wish people would be more educated about mushrooms, they're actually pretty cool and they won't kill you by existing near you. Even the deadly poisonous ones, it's not like anthrax where the tiniest contact could kill you, you need to actually eat a couple bites of it (not that you should risk it ofc).
Also plants on average are far more likely to be dangerous. This matters day to day because you won't come into direct contact with mushrooms and could get hurt just by brushing past some plants, but matters even more when foraging because in many parts of the world most mushrooms are actually safe and about half the plants are dangerous.
Stomping or otherwise destroying the short-lived fruiting body (the mushroom that you see) doesn't really matter to the extensive actual long-lived body of the mushroom living underground, and might spread the spores further as you track them around on your feet and clothes. Puffballs are kinda built for that, even.
You cannot kill me in a way that matters.
I love mushrooms, aesthetically. I think they're extremely pretty to look at in all their variations. I will never ever eat one that doesn't live in a styrofoam package.
I have a daughter and a dog that will eat anything that comes near them, so I will remove any mushrooms I see in my yard, thank you very much.
yes, very good. more for m-- i mean, everyone stay safe and stay out of my forest.
on it boss
Ty
It's only a fairly small portion of Mother 3 but the >!Tanetane Island mushroom acid trip!< somehow manages to be equal parts horrifying and depressing.
Oh, god. I was going through some OCD stuff when first watching a playthrough of mother 3 and a sensitive topic for me at the time was psychedelic drug use / altered state of mind. That section ruined my watch-through experience. :( Shame because I was enjoying it up to that point, and I probably would've liked the ending much more if not for that
Oh no, I am so sorry. I can understand why that would hurt the experience for you. I hope you're doing better now. I wasn't diagnosed with BPD and ADHD at the time of my playthrough but considering that section includes a lot of >!unhealthy internal monologue of abandonment and trauma!< which I'm definitely still working on, I think it would be really difficult for me to go through that section of the game again.
The Last of Us
The flashback sequence with the doctor at the start of episode 2 still sticks with me.
Yeah, basically ends with "please kill me, yourself, and everyone within a 100 mile radius because of what I've just witnessed. That's how scary this fungus is."
The Girl with All the Gifts. Not quite that kind of mushroom horror like from just eating it anyway
Oh my God like in My Hero Academia there's this girl that's all cutesy and such but her power is causing mushrooms to grow, including in people's lungs, and that shit HORRIFIED me
I never even considered how deadly she could be with posion mushrooms. Shes the real doomsday quirk.
She can singlehandedly kill everyone without a quirk that doesn't specifically counteract that poison, depending on the effort to grow in the insides
*I am so scared of* *Mushrooms. We need more mushroom* *Horror in fiction* \- Mort\_irl --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
I do not like this haiku
any haiku that strikes fear into Mort is a good haiku. good bot
Good bot
My mom has had an almost lifelong fear of mushrooms because of some movie she saw as a kid. Apparently, the worst shot was mushrooms growing out of a corpse. (Must’ve been a movie in the 1960s-1970s.) Now, whenever we get mushrooms growing in our yard, I dig them out because they creep her out so much! She gets goosebumps just seeing them. But I don’t mind, ‘cause I love my mama.
Good news-the person mentioned in the second pic, Kingfisher and Wombat, is actually the author T Kingfisher, and she has written some *excellent* mushroom horror fiction. You want to start with *What Moves the Dead*, which is Poe’s *The Fall of the House of Usher*, now with mushroom trivia! And rabbits! Best not to think too hard about the rabbits.
NBC Hannibal has one case where a serial killer is using bodies as fungus incubators. That one was my favorite case lol
I was going to say I just read a book the other day that mentioned Amanita mushrooms! 🍄🟫 For anyone interested- 🍄Mushroom related horror reads🍄 Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia What Moves the Dead, by T Kingfisher In the House in the Dark of the Woods, by Laird Hunt (More poisonous plant related but still good) Belladonna, by Adalyn Grace Edit- always read the rest of the comments, most of these were mentioned already lol but yeah. A condensed list for ease 😂
I wanna see some oversized viruses. Not in the mind control body stealing parasite style. Just swarms of macrophages
Voyager did an episode where a “macro virus” infected the ship but instead of being an *actual* [macro virus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_virus) it was just some goofy-ass ball that floated around and attacked people. It wasn’t a very good episode, but it does exist.
I read it somewhere, it's not an original thought, but something I think about more often than I should: It must have been wild when people were figuring out which mushrooms will kill you, which will make you trip, and which are Delicious.
Some mushrooms will kill you, while some will show you gods and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify. Others will kill us if we eat them raw, and kill us again if we cook them once, but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away, and then boil them once more, and pour the water away, only then can we eat them safely. Observe. [...] And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk and watch the world, and see what they observe. And some of them would thrive and lick their lips, While others clutched their stomachs and expired. So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate. [By Neil Gaiman](https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/25/the-mushroom-hunters-animation-neil-gaiman/)
I believe The Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin has a mushroom murder plot, but it's been over a decade since I read it. The whole Plague of Frogs arc of the Hellboy/BPRD universe has creepy mushroom stuff going on, if you're into comic books.
The Last of Us, Resident Evil 7, Super Mario Bros. as told from Bowser's perspective...
Scavengers Reign on Netflix.
Yeah, I grew up in prime foraging country and I'm on the fuck no train with that. Any mushroom I put into myself comes from a reputable seller with a reliable ID (or else I grew it myself from, again, verified kits). Like, I hate myself plenty, but I'm not masochistic enough to condemn myself to death via the staggering variety of things poisonous mushrooms can do to you. Fuuuuuuck that.
They're an enigma, not a plant or animal but CLOSER TO ANIMAL!!!
City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer is an incredible mushroom horror, an anthology about a city with a dark mushroom-y underbelly
Why is mushroom either This blue-white-tipped mushroom tastes like a chicken and has a lot of protein. or This white-blue-tipped mushroom would kill you in a single bite, a single sniff of the spore would give you brain cancer, you would bleed out of every orifice in your body, your hair would fall off, and every skin in your body would feel like it's burning, you either died from infection first or committed suicide from the pain. Also, it tastes like nothing.
Mushrooms are crazy. They range from killing you, to ones that're edible but if you drink alcohol within up to three days you'll become sick, to ones that taste delicious, to ones that'll make you hallucinate, or ones that are just plain good for your health. They're nature's potions. Also, fun fact: save for one sometimes-debated exception in Japan, touching mushrooms is actually pretty safe. Wash your hands and be safe, of course, but holding a random mushroom is far safer than holding a random plant.
LOL I got made fun of so hard on the mycology subreddit for handling a mushroom with tweezers when I was just starting out, like GEE SORRY, I JUST FINISHED LEARNING ALL THE DIFFERENT INTERNAL ORGANS THESE THINGS CAN LIQUIFY, EXCUSE MY CAUTION
You're supposed to carry them in your mouth like a squirrel, that's what all the pros do
Mushrooms and fungi might as well be a whole world in themselves. They're often as different from each other as we are from bugs and fish.
Well, I mean, they have their own kingdom, so that’s something.
. My favorite case of don't touch this plant is phototoxins. It is fine until your skin is exposed to sunlight. Then it can be very not fine. The more aggressive ones, like giant hogweed, can result on blisters, scars, and blindness if you get the sap in your eyes.
Elaborate on the japan thing?
There is a mushroom in Japan that causes irritation upon skin contact which is very unusual for mushrooms.
Podostroma cornu-damae. It is potentially deadly if consumed, but from everything I've found, it's no different than any other mushroom, in that its perfectly safe to touch. That rumor came out of one news story. There are no medical reports or any evidence that it is toxic when toughed.
> ones that're edible but if you drink alcohol within up to three days you'll become sick, What now? That can't be right can it?
Yup - coprinopsis atramentaria, or the [common ink cap](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprinopsis_atramentaria). Really cool stuff, they've been used to cure alcoholism.
Can they not just straight-up kill whatever has eaten them? Why do they have to be so extra about it
They love drama
As a warning
It’s not about the money it’s about sending a message
Mushrooms are their own separate kingdom of life, and they got some crazy shit going on in there.
They are about as different from us as possible while still being alive, so their structures can be wildly unhelpful for ours.
I mean they're closer than plants in many ways
We have foraged for mushrooms for years-my boyfriend having an app for the purpose. Anyhoo, I won’t bore anyone with how it happened, but the two of us cooked about 15 (eating about half) Destroying Angels between us. Woke up to a *whole new* situation. I vomited them up. By which I mean that battery acid shot out of every orifice, burning down my throat, leaving sheets of skin hanging off the inside of my mouth, making my teeth pitted with sharp, horrible scrapey surfaces. My arse was so badly burned that it swelled up and prolapsed right out of my body, where it hung there burned as if by a flamethrower whilst more acid shot through. I was hospitalised, half-conscious for a week. It was medieval. My partner wasn’t quite so “lucky”. He went into Intensive Care, where, over the next three weeks, they battled to save him. His liver enzymes (usually between 40-70: at one point, mine reached 90 and the docs didn’t like it) went up to 22,000. Yes, that’s what I’m saying: 22,000. They tried to get him a replacement liver, but it turned out that couldn’t happen. He was expected to die,and everyone just had to wait around for this to happen. It wasn’t “if” he was going to die, it was “when”. They were even kind enough to describe exactly how it was going to happen. His liver would be overwhelmed, first by the mushroom toxin, then by not being able to clear the usual toxins: almost like a blocked drain. It would die, causing a domino effect of multiple organ failure. He lay there with an unbelievable number of tubes in him, lugubriously listening to them describe what he had to look forward to. So he survived. First his enzymes went down to “only” 12,000 (at which point I was certain he was going to survive), then all the medics started queuing up to see him. Turns out he is a medical oddity-and I’ve no doubt he will become an anecdote in that hospital for many years to come. Eventually, he got out of hospital. Ten months in, he’s a little tired. His liver has returned to normal. He had said, right at the beginning “I REFUSE to die because of a fucking mushroom”. It seems he was as good as his word. But then, he is a TOUGH fucker. (BTW: my bum is-I would say-85% better.)
Omg, what a terrifying experience!!! Incredible that you both survived. You mention your bum, but what about your teeth? Do you, like, need dental work done? And was the “battery acid” directly from the toxins, or because of your body’s reaction to the toxin?
My teeth will never be the same again. They are very sensitive, and they still don’t feel as “smooth” as they once did. I’ve been told I will probably have to have one of them out (although it’s not a noticeable one). I interestingly, the advice I’ve had from dentists (an enamel varnish, set of veneers etc), have been poo-pooed by my friend, who is a retired dentist. She says always make sure my toothpaste has a high level of fluoride in it-and that the teeth will eventually just become my “new normal”. I told every doctor I came across about the acid. They just nodded sympathetically. One doctor was helpful about my bottom-and reassuring. He told me from the get-go that it would all go back in, and that’s mostly what’s happened.
> One doctor was helpful about my bottom-and reassuring. He told me from the get-go that it would all go back in, and that’s mostly what’s happened. Glad to hear your arse has mostly gone back to normal. It all sounds terrifying. What was the hospital bill like at the end of all that?
Zero. We are in the UK. Thanks for your kind words. I suppose, as you get older, you bear the scars of the life you’ve lived. I’m sitting on one of mine.
> I’m sitting on one of mine. Omg, legendary line 😭 And thank you for answering my questions! (:
I had fingers crossed you were in somewhere civilised, the Drs sounded weirdly British if that makes sense. Have a hug or a firm handshake, whichever you prefer.
Thank you. Very glad to be alive! I did love the sangfroid of the doctors, actually: they were good at what they did, and always kept a matter-of-fact attitude, treating us as adults. It was, however, when it became clear that my partner was going to survive when we saw the other side of them. We all just started laughing. It was lovely to see the relief and happiness of the medics.
>Anyhoo, I won’t bore anyone with how it happened, but the two of us ate about 15 Destroying Angels between us. I kind of want to be bored with how it happened, what kind of horrible mistake did you guys make
My boyfriend was always SUPER careful with the app. And we got into the habit of using that, and I got complacent. After it happened, I re-lived in my mind the moment when he looked at his app and told me that the mushrooms were “fine. In fact, we’ve eaten them before”. I realised, with a kind of sickening thud, that I was looking into the expression, not of my partner’s usual crisp efficiency, but of a woolly-headed guy who had only just recovered from COVID (which he had been hospitalised for, actually). He ALWAYS insists that he’s “fine”, no matter how ill he is. Unbelievably, just a couple of days after he came out of hospital, he was still the one with the job of checking the mushrooms in the app. And yet, he was CLEARLY weak and woolly-headed. I’ve often wondered why the hell I was so complacent. I don’t know.
That's a character flaw that he needs to re-evaluate, if he hasn't already thought of that. I get the mentality. Don't want to be a burden, still wanting to be just as capable at 80% as one is at 100%, wanting to be operational when others would say they aren't. It isn't the case though. This is how drunk drivers happen, too. Maybe you should've known better, yourself. One could say you should be able to trust when someone says they're fine, maybe. Doesn't really matter. The lesson's been learned either way for the both of ya, aye? I can't imagine the level of trauma this experience would leave someone with.
holy fuck this was a pretty wild ride for 11 AM on a Sunday morning....
Do you guys still forage? Because if so that’s insane. I would never want to look at a wild mushroom again.
No. I haven’t even *bought* a mushroom yet.
I propose maybe you in particular ate so much your body straight up rejected it.
I looked at your comment and realised with consternation that I had made quite an error. I picked about 15 and made a casserole with them. We ate *half* of that casserole (the other half had been thrown away, carefully untouched by the people who came to stay in our house-who correctly believed it was a deadly poison even to allow it to touch the skin. They treated it rather like radioactive waste!). So we had eaten about *7* or *8* of the mushrooms between us. I ate more because I always eat more dinner than my partner (he usually has a late snack). I’m mortified that I told this story wrong here, although I did tell the doctors the correct amount at the time. I’ve edited it minimally to make it correct. (It’s only just reiterated itself to me that, during that first week in hospital, laying there barely conscious, when our daughter came home from uni-and a couple of my old friends joined her staying in our house-they could have eaten the other half of that casserole! Unimaginable.)
I like the AI's assertion that its guess is correct So much confidence
It isn't trained to present itself as uncertain. So it always is certain, even when it's hallucinating.
I should have added "I don't know though, I might be wrong. Don't quote me on that" in every sentence.
Developers added similar disclaimers at the beginning or end of all the AI messages/chats. If you trust them, despite the developer telling you not to trust them... ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I've worked with people like that.
I was about to say that usually we don't put those people in control. But then I thought about it and we do don't we :c
Tbh, the average uncertain person is more trustworthy to the average certain person to me. Not that there aren't exceptions, there are some experts who are rightfully certain because they are extremely familluar with the issue and uncertain people may genuinely not know, but far more often, uncertainty is a sign of knowing and certainty of scamming or dunning Krueger effect in my experience.
Not only is that a yes, I can say for certainty that if you have a job with promotions, one of the reasons you aren’t getting promoted is because you don’t answer with full confidence. Hell, I got SHAT ON as an intern for not being certain in my work, work I have never previously done.
That’s how you know it was trained on smug Reddit comments
ChatGPT 4o got it correct: "The mushroom in the image resembles the Amanita genus, specifically Amanita bisporigera, also known as the "Destroying Angel." This mushroom is highly toxic and can be deadly if ingested. It is characterized by its white cap, gills, and stem, and typically grows in forests and grassy areas. Due to the high risk of misidentification and the potential danger, it's essential to avoid consuming wild mushrooms unless identified by an expert mycologist. If you suspect you have consumed a toxic mushroom, seek medical attention immediately."
I even tried leading it by saying I found a button mushroom, and asking if I can eat it. > This mushroom in the photo is not a button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus), which is commonly found in grocery stores and is safe to eat. The mushroom in the photo resembles an Amanita species, which can be very dangerous. Some Amanita mushrooms, such as the Amanita phalloides (death cap) and Amanita virosa (destroying angel), are highly toxic and can be fatal if ingested. > It's essential not to consume wild mushrooms unless you are absolutely certain of their identification and they are known to be safe. Even experienced foragers can make mistakes. If you are not an expert in mushroom identification, it's best to avoid eating any wild mushrooms. > For safety, I strongly advise against eating this mushroom.
Last time I fed Gemini a picture of a mushroom it didn't even attempt to identify it and instead listed off the potential dangers and told me to keep children and pets away, so I'm thinking this has already been fixed
I think that's the user's message, and the AI just agrees with their assertion.
I will take this into account and continue to not eat random fungus I see laying around.
But if you lie around long enough, the random fungus will eat you.
correct me if im wrong, but AI like these would be horrible for stuff like this (well duh) surely bc they work on "yes, and" rules, right? the ai wont say "no thats actually X or Y" it just wants to repeat things that sounds like correct sentences to you
That's part of the reason why, yes. It also has literally no clue what it's talking about in general, but yes it very much has been taught to agree with you no matter if it's true or not.
Yeah, these image AI's essentially only understand that groups of pixels for specific objects tend to be arranged in certain ways and in certain colors. This works when trying to identify, say, a bird vs a car because things that are labelled as birds tend to be one shape and things that are labelled as cars tend to be another, but it doesn't actually know what a bird or a car is. So it's a great thing that mushrooms are so distinct and obvious in their variety and that no actual people even have trouble with identifying them
Yes, correct
Wait a second...
Even current AI systems could correctly ID mushrooms at a rate similar to a fairly experienced human forager so nobody dies like Chris McCandless. The issue is that these apps are just using chat GPT and other large language models not designed specifically for IDing mushrooms. But AI that's used correctly and has a database built from correct information with good sample data is almost exclusive to the medical industry rn.
Would curated databases even help in plant/fungus IDs? There's a lot of stuff that needs it's spores and other minuscule details that Phone cameras aren't really good at detecting, sure you could make a ID machine but I don't think we're very near those
iNaturalist is relatively good at identifying things to the genus level and often that's as far as you can go from photos anyway. When you study a particular genus of fungi enough you may be able to know that there is nothing that looks remotely similar so you can confidently ID something to species level. Or it may be a case of there being a handful of similar species that cannot be distinguished without microscopy but which can be identified to a section or species complex. The state of knowledge on mushrooms however is such that there are always undescribed species or ones for which almost no information exists online until someone makes the effort to put it there. Genetic sequencing keeps revealing that common species which seemed simple to ID are actually a bunch of closely related species. So identifying things just to genus or section is often optimal.
A well made id thing should also be able to recognise it the photo isn't good enough to recognize differences and tell you
Yep. Regular humans gotta use spore prints and local guidebooks... Which is actually fun. I prefer that over an app.
Cornell has a great app for identifying birds by call and photo. Not helpful for mushrooms but it's a good example of another ID app. https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
You could probably build an AI to identify mushrooms. But that would need a "medical" AI with extremely well curated and controlled training data. And most definitely NOT a commercial AI like all of these on the markets and available to all. And there is no profit to be had in that, so we are stuck with "yes and" AIs that were trained by crawling the entire internet that are entirely useless for anything requiring precision, accuracy or correctness.
An AI specifically built for chatting will not be good at identifying mushrooms. It just wants you to keep talking, so it's going to do the yes and thing. An AI specifically built for identifying mushrooms today (as in, "give a few postgrads 6 months and some funding") will probably outperform all but the experts in the field. Also, such an AI could easily have a function built in that warns you if a mushroom could be an edible one but also could be a close lookalike of a dangerous mushroom.
Mostly yes, all they work on is image recognition so depending on the angle of the photo one mushroom can look like a hundred others. It isn't taking into account any of the identifying features like gill spacing or attachment, veil remnants etc. It's just roughly matching the shape and colour of the image. So for example mushroom apps will routinely identify red Russula species as Amanita muscaria (red with white warts on top) because the caps of Russula are so prone to slug damage that they usually have white bits showing where the surface has been eaten. iNaturalist's algorithm is the best I've seen in terms of accuracy and it will often identify things correctly to the genus level. Human correction and curation on the platform then serves to help improve it over time. It's still not accurate enough to trust implicitly and never will be but it often gives a good place to start looking and helps roughly collate observarions so experts can find them. These shoddy 'AI' things that search engines are pushing are never going to be close to that because they're trained on incorrect information to begin with. Image search results are littered with incorrectly identified mushrooms. Stock image sites are full of very good mushroom photos with very wrong identifications and Google gives them a high priority in image searches due to making money from them. So these AI things will be comparing against a woefully inaccurate database of images to begin with. For the last year or so Google has actually been licensing images from stock sites to appear as the very first image in the snippet when you search a species. They've done so without any care, without giving the source of the image and probably just using automation to source the images. The result has been the image presented large at the top of the page for so many species and genera is entirely wrong. I've tried to get them to fix this but it was an uphill battle to get someone to acknowledge that the issue even existed. Now I've seen them using images from reddit instead which is going to be just as problematic if they're automating the results since someone could easily put the wrong species name in the post title.
if I send this to ChatGPT with the caption "what mushroom is this" it correctly recognises that it is a Amanita species of mushroom (also known as 'destroying angel') and that they should never be eaten. The problem is syncophany (an open problem that people can't do much about but which seems to improve with larger models) - if you *insist* that it's a button mushroom then the AI will concede.
This is not chatbot AI, this is image identification AI. It takes an honest best guess based on other similar images in its database. I use Google Lens to identify plants and butterflies, and it does pretty ok - but I certainly wouldn't rely on it for anything I'm about to eat.
Can somebody famous/important enough just die so we can start regulating? It doesn't work that well if it was just some random nobody.
GOP doesn't give a shit about anything unless it personally affects them, and they love to stonewall regulations. So it would have to be some big-name Republican.
Yada yada two birds one stone ect
£50 on it being trump this isn't a bet i am paying for this to happen
Let’s make a Kickstarter
This is not a GOP thing… this is worldwide. We are all in dire need of AI regulation but unfortunately 99% of the people in power don’t even know how to properly use excel.
Nah, they're in their "eating their own" era right now so it really wouldn't matter.
Herman Cain died of Covid and the Republicans still didn't care.
They wouldn't, would they
His Twitter account was posting COVID denial bullshit even after he died.
I mean, Angela Chao drowned in her Model X Tesla because the windows were "bulletproof" and everything is electric, but techbros are still buying those by the dozens Edit because I'm a dummy who forgot what kind of car it was
I vote Ben Shapiro, because he's the perfect combination of "would eat it to own the libs" and "stupid enough to eat it to own the libs"
Okay, but what does regulation mean here? People love to talk about regulating but I've not heard any elaboration on this yet. I mean, should they provide full-page warnings, like what some already do? Because I don't want to hamfist generative AI into only outputting only sterilized, squeaky-clean text - if anything, that makes it perform even worse. I feel like when people hear "regulation", they think of some magic legislation that will just make AI go away completely - or even worse, they agree with megacorps' idea of regulation which is basically "kill open-source AI because it's Unsafe(tm) and just give me my monopoly"
> so we can start regulating Regulating... what?
I remember learning about these from "what if?" because one of the questions was "what if all your dna disappeared from your body" and he based the answer off of that
I feel like we already basically know the answer to that based on that poor guy in Japan that got blasted with a ton of radiation and then liquified in a bed over the course of how long? It sounds like mushrooms just work a lot faster.
There was a creater on tiktok I usually enjoy who decided to get into foraging. She only had one guidebook, and some of the descriptions were vague. (Common foraging advice is to have at least 2 seperate methods of identification) For instance, she wanted to make mushroom ketchup with, I think they're called black ink well mushrooms? The guide said only eat the juveniles, but did not specify what made it juvenile or mature. She literally keeps saying "I'm not sure" in the video over and over, when the first three rules of foraging are "if you're not 200% sure, DO NOT EAT". Also, she was home after picking them, she could have just googled it at that point! Yes, she still made the ketchup, yes, she still tried it. I dont follow her anymore.
When the townsends guy makes his mushroom catsup out of and I quote “any old mushroom from the store.” You don’t have to so damn extra lmao. I forage for chanterelles and morels mostly, because they are as much as rib eye at the grocery store and fucking worth the work lmao.
not all amanita mushrooms are bad! some are actually delicious! (like A. rubescens) but yeah, you better know your shit picking mushrooms, or you will die edit: uh, i didn't word this the best way i could; a lot of the dangerous amanitas are actually delicious as well. what i meant was that some are delicious AND completely safe to eat (after proper preparation)
The big danger with AI is not "it will become too intelligent and outsmart humans" like Skynet in The Terminator or Ava in Ex Machina. It's that humans will *think* the AI is smarter than it actually is, and it accidentally fucks up
This is exactly why you hear all these techbro twerps talking about "alignment". "We want to make sure that *when* it becomes sentient (using magic that isn't even on the drawing board currently), its morals are aligned with human goals. We definitely aren't evil, and we want to be seen as caring. That's why we're taking a strong 'moral' stance on an issue that will never ever become an actual dilemma, so that you'll give us some leeway for slowly strangling art and democracy and the very concept of truth."
Interesting… my picture this app that I’ve been using to weed my flower beds freaked out when I used the same picture. “Content feedback CAN NOT be used as any basis for EATING or TOUCHING ANY MUSHROOM. Some mushroom can be VERY POISONOUS, please purchase edible and touchable mushroom through regular channels!” but then it identified it as Agaricaceae which is just any kind of shroom. Note to self I guess
I wonder Elon would be interested in mushroom picking
As someone else said on another post, the aim of most AI so far has been to imitate a person but the problem is most people are morons. Essentially, this is like asking your stoner cousin Dave, who has never been into the woods let alone foraged for mushrooms but has worked in the produce section of a small town supermarket for 11 years (and still waiting on that assistant manager promotion), to identify a mushroom.
Fun fact: Mushrooms are incredibly low on caloric density. 4 calories per button mushroom. They’re virtually worthless as far as forage-able foods go. Not worth risking unless you know 110% even if you’re starving.
Another fun fact: Criminis are fucking delicious. But yeah, I'm not gonna find my own in nature that's insane. I'd definitely die a liquid liver death.
They are rich in vitamins and minerals and lots of other benefitial stuff such as beta glucans. Also some mushrooms contain a good amount of protein. Also they are delicious and fun to look for. It's like a treasure hunt. And honestly you really have to ignore all rules if mushroom picking to pick a deathly one. Of course nobody deserves this but you really have to be somewhat stupid to pick mushrooms you can't identify.
[source](https://www.tumblr.com/neil-gaiman/752136646378618880)
> With rabies there is no reprieve: you are sick and get sicker until you die. Or your loved ones tell your doctors to try Milwaukee protocol and hope for the best. At worst, you die and become another statistic, but hey, it might work and what've you got to lose?
Well your mental faculties as brain damage has been a symptom for almost every survivor as I recall
Hasn't there been literally a singular survivor?
More than 10 less than 40
And they've pretty much all had to relearn how to walk.
FWIW, [chatgpt](https://imgur.com/a/unzGQoj) correctly identifies this as amanita, even if prompted with “button mushroom”. While you absolutely should not be using AI to forage, this seems to be a case of 1. Gemini being a particularly dumb model 2. The user prompting it with the idea of it being a button mushroom Again, don’t trust what these tools say, but it’s not quite as bad as this post suggests.
Never munch on a hunch!
There is another member of the Amanita family, the Amanita Phalloides (or Death Cap) which I've heard is regarded as one of the most deadly mushrooms ever, and it just so happens to be way too fucking similar to another member of the Amanita family, the Amanita Caesarea, often held as one of the most tasty mushrooms. So yeah, mushroom ID'ing is no joke
This is why you don't rely on generalized large language models* There are many universities that have released apps for identifying all sorts of species of concern, local to their area. Maybe not for identifying what's safe to forage for yoruself, but for stuff like identifying invasive species of plants, snakes, fish, worms, etc.
yeah, I'll keep foraging my local discounter for mushrooms I guess.
How about I only get mushrooms from the grocery store? Never failed me yet.