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Weve found the weak point of AI mushrooms!

A plethora of applications designed to help foragers identify wild mushrooms have surfaced in app marketplace such as App Store and Play Store. These applications, which make use of AI, assert that they can recognize different kinds of mushrooms from a smartphone photo alone.

Although AI has advanced quickly in several fields recently, it appears to be less effective at identifying mushrooms. According to recent studies, these apps have a proven error rate of at least 50%, indicating that they regularly make mistakes.

AI image recognition systems are not reliable for identifying mushrooms because you simply cant tell if a mushroom is edible by just looking at it.

The yellow stainer mushroom is non-edible and it looks just like an edible horse mushroom from above and the side. You need to pick it up and scratch it or smell it to actually tell what it is, explains Colin Davidson, a mushroom forager with a PhD in microbiology.

Indeed, there are many edible mushrooms that resemble toxic ones. To recognize them, you must examine them from several perspectives in order to spot characteristics like rings and gills.

Furthermore, mushrooms are highly polymorphic, often changing both in color and shape. External factors such as weather conditions can also influence their appearance; for instance, rain can discolor the cap of mushrooms.

All of this is currently beyond the reach of image recognition algorithms, which lack enough data to properly identify mushrooms. And that explains why these apps make mistakes half the time.

Relying on these apps can be quite dangerous, as evidenced by the situation in France. Of the 30,000 types of mushrooms found in France, only 100 are edible and twenty are potentially fatal. In 2021, there were approximately 1,250 intoxications, and in 2022, the number rose to almost 2,000 intoxications, including around 40 severe cases and 2 fatalities.

See more here:

Why you Shouldn't Trust AI to Identify your Mushrooms - Medium