> ...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.

oysters are pretty safe

This time of year it is common for folks to mistake Dear mushrooms (Pluteus cervinus) with the poisonous juvenile invasive Amanita family.

Amanita travels everywhere with wood mulch around local gardens, and is practically impossible to get rid of once established.

Stay safe, and never believe your own lying eyes when it comes to mycology. Could join a local university hosted public outreach foraging club, as the experts enjoy nothing more that spotting weird looking finds. =3

Certainly 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.

No. At the very least you need a photo of both the upper side of the cap and the gills.

many 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.

Do the false chanterelles that you encounter smell similar to chanterelles?

The false chanterelle that I know is not poisonous.

They 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.

You should never trust any image-based method for mushroom identification.

It is simply not possible to identify mushrooms from image alone, no matter how good your LLM is.

What is needed before it is wise to trust LLMs with life or death decisions?

Or, what is needed before we are forced to give LLMs control of life or death decisions in the name of profits?

Around 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.

We'll cross it around the same time we hand over nuclear reactor and airplane control systems to LLMs.

Mushroom 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Why 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.

Someone who your estate can sue and get a settlement of a dollar value equal to your own estimation of your future life's worth?

Honestly, yeah. I wouldn't eat a wild mushroom. The ones in the store are good enough for me.

The 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.

Humanity is in its "fuck around" phase with LLMs and is going to fly headlong into "find out" soon.

Some 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.

Some reasons to forage (applies to berries, nuts, fruits, not just mushrooms):

* Foraging is very satisfying to do

* Foraging allows you to participate in your cultural practices (although sadly many people in the US are long-cut off from such cultural knowledge)

* You can get fresher food foraging

* There absolutely are interesting varieties that aren't sold because they are hard to farm/transport/store etc.

* Foraged food is free

You 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.

I agree. Foraging out in the beautiful woods connecting to nature by eating what you picked is irrational.

There is a great variety of mushrooms with distinct characteristics, many of which are only found in the wild. Even the ones sold at restaurants are often sourced from foragers. It's a skill to find and identify them and for many it's an exciting hobby.

Taste aside, foraging in the woods--whether for mushrooms, berries or herbs--unlocks some atavistic response inside me. It feels deeply true to my nature as an animal, and is very rewarding in a way that surprised me when I first did it.

Same as fishing or hunting, or foraging blueberry or blackberries while hiking, there's some primal reward in gathering your own food (occasionally, that is).

I’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

Are you this actively shitty towards all hobbies you don't also enjoy?

People have been foraging for mushrooms for literally thousands of years, but mushroom cultivation is pretty recent, and the overwhelming majority of edible species have not yet been reliably cultivated.

Are you ignorant of where those interesting flavors come from (indeed, are discovered)?

This has strong "why should we care about farms? People get everything they need from the store" vibes.

I had a friend that was quite passionate about foraging for mushrooms while we were in high school. He eventually went on to receive a PhD. in mycology. My old friend as well as everyone else I knew that liked to forage mushrooms were... uh... not looking for "flavorful" mushrooms to say the least.

Did you read the post or just decide to advertise your dislike of AI by wishing ill on others?