25 years ago I was writing a paper on AI ethics and part of it was creating a mushroom identification program using a neural Network backed, image processing and language model. The conclusion of my paper was that it was wholly unethical to suggest that AI could correctly identify mushrooms based on descriptions and pictures alone, when the price for failure is death.
Actually weird that I still haven’t heard of someone dead after using Google lens on some mushroom
Yeah it’s going to happen one day, although it probably wouldn’t be the first thought of anyone investigating a poisoning to check the victims phone.
I can’t remember exactly, but I seem to remember that some mushrooms required the flesh to be cut, smell information, and in some cases a chemical test was the only way to give a differential ID with 100% accuracy.
The most fun thing about the whole project was having to go for walks in the woods to complete an assignment.
Apparently inky caps are completely edible -- unless you drink alcohol.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprinopsis_atramentaria
I especially like this part:
Disulfiram has, however, been known to cause myocardial infarction (heart attack). The symptoms can occur if even a small amount of alcohol is consumed up to three days after eating the mushrooms, although they are milder as more time passes. Rarely, a cardiac arrhythmia, such as atrial fibrillation on top of supraventricular tachycardia, may develop. Because of these effects, in some cases, the mushroom has been used to cure alcoholism.
Everything about that is wild.
That's wild. Makes me wonder if it was ever weaponized by temperance movements.
Interesting; apparently there are no known cases of anyone dying from it, but it stops ethanol from metabolising properly so like with antabus you mostly just feel like shit for a while. So it sounds like an actually useful treatment for alcoholism.
