Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat.
The AI images were flagged by the moderator of the r/mycology Reddit community, dedicated to “the love of fungi,” including, “hunting, foraging, [and] cultivation.” The moderator, who goes by MycoMutant, noticed that when they searched for the Coprinus comatus a fungus commonly known as shaggy ink cap or shaggy mane, the first image in the Google snippet, which is featured above the search results, was an AI-generated image that looked nothing like a real Coprinus comatus.
As we’ve seen in other instances when Google search surfaced AI-generated images and presented them to users in results as if they were real, Google pulled the AI-generated image from a site where it was plainly flagged as such. The image was hosted on the stock image site Freepik, where it had an “AI-generated” label on top of the image. “This resource was generated with AI,” the description of the image says. “You can create your own using our AI image generator.” The image was also wrongly labeled as “Coprinus comatus.”
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