AI ruiniert die Zimmerpflanzengemeinschaften online | „Es trennt uns weiter von der Realität, den Beziehungen zur Natur und auch unserer Gemeinschaft.“

From the article: “Maybe you could organize your plants like this,” my friend’s text message said, with an attached photo of white pots of plants floating midair in front of a huge, sunny window. As a newbie plant collector, I do need to organize my growing collection of flora, but not like this — the photo was AI-generated and the plants depicted were not real.

Even as a beginner, I was able to identify issues with the photo. Obviously, my plants cannot physically defy gravity, but most egregiously, the organizational method of putting plants in direct sunlight would completely incinerate their leaves. This was the first time I came across AI-generated plant content from well-meaning people who earnestly believe it is real, but its proliferation is a growing problem in plant-lover communities online and off.

While online retailers have often scammed less-knowledgeable consumers, the rise of online stores using AI-generated photos of fake, usually vibrant, and otherworldly-looking plants to fool consumers into buying seeds for plants that do not exist has been remarked upon by multiple plant-specific blogs, podcasts, and communities in the last three years.

“In the springtime we get customers asking about AI-generated plants multiple times a week,” says Casey Schmidt Ahl, engagement manager at the Colonial Gardens, a garden center in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, who has published a blog post teaching plant owners how to spot fake AI plant scams online. “We always make sure that we tell them that it is an AI-generated — or at least heavily photoshopped — image, and that they need to be really careful because we know that if we just say we don’t have it, they are more likely to just go online and buy it.”

According to the post written by Ahl, one customer called in asking about a black bleeding heart plant. Ahl only had bleeding hearts — which have hanging petals that look like hearts dripping in liquid — in white and pink, so she searched for the black version online. The red flags were there: there was only one image of the plant across multiple websites, and there wasn’t specific information about the plant’s growth or variety.

R/futurology needs reassess what posts it allows. A number of AI related posts are clickbait nonsense—once you read the article you see that the headline is incorrect alarmism that ignores how minor the issue in the article actually is.