AI is ruining houseplant communities online

> “If instead of looking at your plants and making sure that they’re watered correctly or reaching out to an expert, you always just take a picture with your AI app and have it tell you what’s wrong, you are letting AI do the thinking for you and you’re not doing the full connection and the mindfulness of having plants,”

Weakest argument against AI I've ever heard.

As a society, we should defend stupid people from being scammed. No irony here. Let's defend the poor, the children, the stupid, these who can't defend themselves.

Taking shortcuts is famously a reliably successful way to get through life. Always has been. Don't know why we're even having this conversation.

It's not just houseplants, but everything sold online.

I wouldn't be surprised if some people have literally flown halfway around the world in search of people, places, or things that don't exist.

Fraud is a seriously neglected topic regardless of what tools are used to commit it.

But we absolutely need to have sports betting.

I agree, I'd like to live in a society where a position against scamming is a good thing for the general good of our society.

I'd wager it is the strongest. Most of the arguments always argue in quantities. So and so much of energy waster per hour, this many job losses and that growing trend of delusions supported by LLMs.

We've already seen it with climate change. Arguing with statistical factoids is too ethereal for anyone and leads to some kind of fatigue. There is no emotional difference between 100 mWh and 10000 mWh. But a "I had to bring my dog to the vet because chatGPT told me to give it chocolate" will convince anyone to deeply distrust technology.

FAANG and its acolytes deprived us from actual connection with our environment. Judging the argument as weak is sad proof of that.

So how about instead of using the slot-machine that chatGPT is, we go visit our grandma, hug our dad or just get a new houseplant :)

I've got houseplants. I'm not part of any community, I just like having them. When I water them I weigh them all and put the before and after weights in a spreadsheet. I them give that to an LLM to spot anything interesting in the numbers.

who decides which people are stupid?

> I them give that to an LLM to spot anything interesting in the numbers.

And what does it come up with?

It shows the dichotomy between people who want to care for their houseplants as a hobby, and the people who just want to keep their plants alive and green without thinking too much about it.

The former build up a mental model about how plants react to light, water, and fertilizer over time. The latter don't care at all how plants work; they just want the answer, and are the main customers for this type of AI.

I would guess that most communities have a similar problem, and the hobbyists are always outnumbered by the people who pop in, demand an answer, and then leave.

Not much. It'll point out when a plant has been taking up less water, and that corresponds to what I notice about the plant health. I've got 9 months of data, maybe after a year it'll be more interesting and give me some seasonal watering tips.