• megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 months ago

    Hell, doesn’t really work in temperate zones ether to be honest. It gets common house/yard plants well but if you go into actual wild-ish areas it will give you 5 different answers from five different angles of the same plant.

    • nik9000@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      I downloaded google lense a while back to identify a mushroom. It was pretty and I was curious. After installing and taking the picture it replied… “Mushroom.”

      The second image said false widow’s death wish or something metal as hell.

      • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 months ago

        Yah, mushrooms are not that hard to identify if you know what to look for. I worry people who do not know what to look for will be far too confident with such an imperfect tool.

        Especially with the growth of demand for foraged mushrooms in restaurants and supermarkets. It’s big money, and I have no doubt some “enterprising” people are going to get people hurt by trusting these tools too much.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      And it would be less of a problem if it showed all options that are likely, instead of just the one it thinks is most likely.

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      I mean its just a matter of total available data points. The more images people take and upload, the more material they have to train their models. And obviously there will be way less people running around the tropics taking pictures.

      • fishpen0@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        It’s honestly way more about plant diversity. There are a million different plants in like a ten square mile area that all look exactly like an aloe and are related. The only way to differentiate them is by hyper obscure differences like their root structure and what their sap consists of.

        You don’t even need to be in the proper tropics. Walk around San Diego with a plant id app and watch it spit out a different name for the same palm tree over and over because there are actually hundreds of varietals of palm with similar extremely complex identification processes. Some with toxic fruit and some with edible fruit that look the same.

        • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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          3 months ago

          I mean for those plants the model should be trained to spit out the next highest common denominator / family instead of the specific species. I would love to get a reply like “this could be any of the following species” instead of “im 23.232% sure that its this species”

          • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            I mean for those plants the model should be trained to spit out the next highest common denominator / family instead of the specific species.

            Most people are going to take photos of the leaves, stem or at best the outside of the flowers. These are rarely conserved within families. You’ll need the arrangement of the four floral whorls to name a family and expect any degree of accuracy. And that’s assuming your plant is an angiosperm.

  • Swallowtail@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    Try iNaturalist, it works pretty well. Also, learn plant morphology, makes it easier to narrow things down when you get a couple suggestions within the same genus or family.

    • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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      3 months ago

      Indeed, basic plant morphology knowledge plus some local Floras and iNaturalist worked out quite well for me in the tropics. There are also so many people that know plants on iNat. You only get into trouble if you try to ID rare species, but that’s also the case in the temperate zones.

  • Rubanski@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    “picture this” is a terrible name choice, but a really good app for identifying plants

  • Spoilt@jlai.lu
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    3 months ago

    My brain read “pants”, I didn’t understand the connection with latitude… Thanks, brain.