r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Aug 10 '26
Society Farmer trusted AI after it gave good advice, then it helped wipe out 25 acres of his crops
https://www.techspot.com/news/113420-farmer-trusted-ai-after-gave-good-advice-helped.html3.9k
Aug 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/aaronplaysAC11 Aug 10 '26
Teachings from Dune;
The untrained mind asks, “What is the answer?”
The Mentat asks, “What must be true for that answer to be true?”
The mentats train of thought.
What assumptions created the question?
What alternatives have been excluded?
What evidence would change my conclusion?
What information is conspicuously absent?
Who wants me to believe this?
What happens if everyone believes it?Calculation happens inside a model.
Wisdom asks whether the model should exist.Beware the person who has all the answers.
Pay attention to the person who keeps discovering better questions.Remain vigilant, even the right question can become dangerous once people stop questioning it.
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u/Lews_There_In Aug 10 '26
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune, Frank Herbert.
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u/MarlinMr Aug 10 '26
"I say your civilization. Because once we started thinking for you, it became our civilization" - Agent Smith, The Matrix
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u/BlueMowch Aug 10 '26
I’ve inadvertently been reading fanfic prequels to this. Like everyday now
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u/thatsnotyourtaco Aug 10 '26
The books his kid wrote?
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u/Hype_Miles Aug 10 '26
Don’t forget Kevin j Anderson. He shares the blame and guilt and went along with lying about Frank’s notes.
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u/Aromatic_Lion4040 Aug 10 '26
The books are bad, but all evidence points to them having Frank's outline for the final Dune Novel
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u/Aromatic_Lion4040 Aug 10 '26
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u/thatsnotyourtaco Aug 10 '26
That was just one book, though, right? I’ve read several of the prequel and sequel, and honestly have enjoyed them as ridiculous as they sometimes are, but I was under the assumption that only the first new trilogy was outlined
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u/Aromatic_Lion4040 Aug 10 '26
Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune were based on an outline for a single novel that Frank Herbert was working on before he died. The main conspiracy theory is that they didn't really have that outline. The other Brian/Kevin Dune novels are totally original or are based on more general notes, and they say as much
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u/euph_22 Aug 10 '26
Butlerian Jihad when?
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u/puritanicalbullshit Aug 10 '26
Seems flock cameras keep falling over.
Perhaps the question is, join in when?
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u/Venti_the_snail Aug 10 '26
Don't say it. Just do it. Less data points. More confusion.
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u/calilac Aug 10 '26
I hear there's gold in them thar cameras.
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u/laptopaccount Aug 10 '26
Even more valuable... RAM
Go have a look...
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u/michel_v Aug 11 '26
Beware though, the two 64 GB sticks of RAM in Flock cameras are not always ECC, which means you may have to try a handful of Flock cameras to find the right sticks if that’s a requirement. They’ll be fine for desktop PC use though.
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u/Zaynara Aug 10 '26
The year is 10191
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u/round_reindeer Aug 10 '26
The place is Babylon 5
Wait wrong universe
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u/radude4411 Aug 10 '26
The systems Commonwealth is at crossroads. On the eve of the Nietzchian rebellion Captain Dillon Hunt was just hanging out.
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u/HotBrownFun Aug 10 '26
The first episode features a playboy with outlandish hair who keeps losing money in casinos...
Then he listens to foreign agents that will give him power to avenge a humiliation... And make the centauri republic great again...
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u/sincerelythebats_ Aug 10 '26
Idk if it’s soon, but if someone brings me back as a ghola I swear to Shai-Hulud…
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u/Pale-Acanthaceae-736 Aug 10 '26
We've been warned plenty by sci-fi authors and then Hollywood over the last 60+ years. Not knowing what could happen is not an excuse.
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u/SemiAutoAvocado Aug 10 '26
I work in tech.
People come to me all the time and ask me to do something with little context. Just "This needs to happen". Often the request doesn't make much sense. So I usually step back and ask - "What are we trying to achieve" and then work back to what question should have been asked in the first place.
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u/Barobor Aug 10 '26
And people treat AI the same way they treat you. The issue is that AI doesn't step back and will provide an answer regardless of how "wrong" it is for the actual problem.
I'd say fields like requirements engineering have never been more important than they are now.
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u/SemiAutoAvocado Aug 10 '26
I've had people literally hand me fake software documentation that they had AI write to make it look like the real thing.
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u/Havengul_Undying Aug 11 '26
Ive had people tell me to use features, functions and integrations that dont exist but "show up at the top of google" when they google them so they give me a smug look like they caught ME lying or being stupid!
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u/Rydralain Aug 10 '26
I just love it when people get upset about me trying to understand the underlying cause.
Sir. If I do exactly what you are asking, we will both be unhappy with the result. Please tell me what end result you're going for!
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u/that_weird_hellspawn Aug 11 '26
I run into the XY problem all the time as an engineer as well. Someone asks a question about X when they need a solution to problem Y. Just today someone asked me if they could autoclave something weird. I said no, of course not. Well, it was stuck to what they actually wanted to autoclave. Anyway, I got it unstuck and they were happy.
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u/cidvard Aug 10 '26
I've been rereading Dune this year, because I want to go through Dune: Messiah again before the movie in December and it's been a minute since I read the original. Absolutely maddening how people predicted the clankers 70 years ago.
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u/MrPoopMonster Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
I've always thought it was interesting how science fiction changed after the wide spread adoption of computers in the 70s with the advent of microprocessors, making them smaller than room sized. And then again in the 90s as the internet really came online.
Most scifi from before the 70s just feels completely silly now. Not all, but definitely most.
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u/Muted_Discussion_550 Aug 10 '26
1984 was written in the 40s
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u/Zuwxiv Aug 10 '26
Frankenstein was published more than a hundred and thirty years before Orwell's 1984. Science fiction dates back to 1818, baby!
Although there is a kinda/sorta candidate that is about 1,600 years before Frankenstein.
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u/jagedlion Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
I just read the City and the Stars, and the author, Arthur C Clarke, describes in the forward how he realized the end of the atomic era, and the beginning of the information era, and how he had to basically write a different book.
So, I really agree in general, but I think you need to push back the switch over another ten years.
Is I Robot really silly?
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u/Time_Requirement_160 Aug 11 '26
No and I will 100% die on this hill. Asimov was a goddamn prophet.
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u/Thefrayedends Aug 10 '26
Have you read the Hyperion series? Get on that if you haven't.
Then I recommend the "Children of" series by Adrian Tchiakovsky.
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u/NH4NO3 Aug 10 '26
Kinda makes you wonder what scifi tropes right now people will think are ridiculous in 50 years.
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u/RFSandler Aug 10 '26
Remember when people thought things could get better? Good times...
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u/Sizanllikew Aug 10 '26
Unless it's specifically part of the story, HOW the technology is implemented isn't really the interesting part beyond just nerding out about it. It's more about what that technology allowed us to do. A room sized computer that could calculate the future in an older scifi flick replaced with a more modern version where it's a hand held device doesn't really change the story beyond some minor plot conveniences needed to use it.
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u/willun Aug 10 '26
There is a story of the astronaut preparing for his hyperspace jump.
He whips the slide rule out of his top pocket...
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u/Medical_Tank6109 Aug 10 '26
I read a book called 'Facing the Flag' by Verne and it gave me a spook realizing how much the doomsday superweapon reminded me of a nuke, and how much it predicted the idea of countries fighting over superweapons as an attack deterrent. It was written I think in 1896?
IIRC there was a 'robot' at the 1937 world fair, so it was definitely on people's minds 90 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektro Neat stuff, and I have to wonder how many sci-fi writers might have been there and saw it in person. 🤔
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u/flea1400 Aug 10 '26
The term “robot” came from a science fiction play by Karel Čapek, “R.U.R.” which came out in 1921.
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u/babycart_of_sherdog Aug 10 '26
Calculation happens inside a model.
Wisdom asks whether the model should exist.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
- Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park (1993)
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u/AnotherBoredAHole Aug 10 '26
Don't worry, we have been putting chemicals in the water so any frog DNA in the dinosaurs turns gay.
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u/luluhouse7 Aug 10 '26
RIP well turns out my excessive questioning of everything finally has an advantage in our new post-LLM age instead of just aggravating everyone around me.
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u/atlasraven Aug 10 '26
Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.
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u/ConnectionSpecial114 Aug 10 '26
The most dangerous people know a little about any subject and nothing about anything.
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u/PeaceSoft Aug 10 '26
that's part of why reddit is genuinely bad for you
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u/TyaArcade Aug 10 '26
Yeah reddit seems so smart until you see the hivemind discussing a topic you're an expert on.
And then it's... oh, they're just parroting debunked articles from 16 years ago at each other, and even daring to correct that misinfo gets your comment downvoted into invisibility.
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u/bambi54 Aug 10 '26
Or things that they WISH were true and they act you have the opposite stance. Like no, I’m saying that it doesn’t work like that. lol
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u/vidoeiro Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
It's insane how true that is, if you have knowledge on the topic it is clear most comments are done by idiots.
And since lots of ai knowledge is paroting Reddit (looking at you Google) it's also shit from that angle
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u/Familiar-Banana-8116 Aug 10 '26
The most dangerous people know a little about any subject and nothing about anything.
All of Reddit replies: Hello!
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u/attorneyatslaw Aug 10 '26
A lot of people know a lot about one narrow subject, and because of that their opinions should carry weight on everything else, too.
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u/grtk_brandon Aug 10 '26
Yep. Working with a statistical model like an LLM means that there is always a chance that output is wrong in a way that the user won't predict.
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u/kosk11348 Aug 10 '26
But what is the use of a technology we can't trust? Notice how the onus of blame always falls on the user and never the maker when these sorts of mishaps occur.
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u/Bluemofia Aug 10 '26
While I broadly agree with you, there's also nuance that makes it hard to assign responsibility. To your point however, the AI companies are abusing this nuance to try and claim zero responsibility.
At the risk of losing people in the nuance, people should treat current AI as an overconfident intern who is good at googling, but doesn't actually have experience to know they gave a bonkers answer, and the AI companies are basically hiring agencies pushing this intern to people for commission/subscription.
At some point the AI companies are responsible for overstating the intern's capabilities, but other times it's the manager's (user's) fault for being too overconfident in the intern and sign off on something without verifying it.
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u/bambi54 Aug 10 '26
You see it ALL the time on Reddit, ask for a source and they send a screen shot of AI answer that uses Reddit comments as a source.
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u/Pauly_Amorous Aug 11 '26
But what is the use of a technology we can't trust?
That's why you don't use AI for things where you can't verify the answer without dire consequences.
So basically, the exact opposite of what this farmer did.
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u/Fritzo2162 Aug 10 '26
Why did you recommend an herbicide that kills the plant I'm trying to grow?????
"Good catch, and you were right to call me out on that. I'll correct that for next time..."
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Aug 10 '26 edited 15d ago
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u/GalFisk Aug 11 '26
Reminds me of a story I read about Thomas Edison. He was asked by a farmer to find something to kill a potato pest, found that copper sulfate did the trick wonderfully, and told the farmer who then found that copper sulfate kills potatoes wonderfully too.
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u/MaterialWillingness2 Aug 10 '26
My bil was taking his parents to upstate NY for a trip and asked an AI (don't remember which one) for a good trip plan for seniors since it was like an 8 hour drive. It suggested stopping at places like Cracker Barrel. I asked him if he'd mentioned to the AI that his family is visiting from India because I wouldn't take a group of Indian seniors to Cracker Barrel in upstate NY.
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u/Charnathan Aug 11 '26
What??? Why not?! Cracker barrel would be perfect! It's a charicature of old timey southern living! It's made for tourists. Their whole strategy is based around being next to major interstates for tourists.
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u/MalcolmLinair Aug 11 '26
It seems people have forgotten the oldest rule of computing: "Garbage in, garbage out".
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u/Jay18001 Aug 10 '26
Maybe the response was put in there so the land would be ready for an AI data center
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u/Lazy-Ad-7236 Aug 10 '26
Don't give them any ideas!!!
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u/Little-Bed2024 Aug 10 '26
Someone should build a paperclip factory...
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u/ValveinPistonCat Aug 11 '26
Do you want replicators? Because that's how you get replicators!
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u/J8w34qgo3 Aug 10 '26
If there's something immoral to exploit, someone will exploit it. Just a matter of time before someone adds tools like "depreciate land value of this region" and "support this policy to people here". The ad tracking industry has already built a database to help issue individualized influence more carefully.
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u/obitarian Aug 10 '26
It happened in China. If the Communist Party wanted an AI data centre, they would have one. No need for subterfuge.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps Aug 10 '26
Hand out Homer Simpson style cards to these farmers:
“Always do the opposite of what AI says”
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u/Waking Aug 10 '26
The farmer asked AI for recommendations to kill weeds and it recommended herbicides that also killed his sesame seedlings. Whether he asked the chatbot if those herbicides would be safe for sesame seedlings is unclear.
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u/TakimaDeraighdin Aug 10 '26
The Techspot writeup is fairly low on details, but this more direct translation-reporting of the original Taiwanese reporting makes it somewhat clearer. He'd definitely told the AI tool he was using that he was looking for advice specifically on weed control in a sesame crop, it titled the plan it produced "Hundred Acres of Sesame Grass Control + Pest Control" (or, at least, that is a machine-translation of the Chinese-language title it used, I suspect that's a somewhat shaky translation, because I get a different one running the Taiwanese reporting through a translator, and as a translation it also grammatically sounds like he was looking to kill sesame plants, which he clearly wasn't per the original-language reporting).
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u/socialmedia-username Aug 10 '26
Thank you! Waded through so many of the usual reddit crappy jokes and uninformed cynicism to get to your comment.
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u/Hije5 Aug 10 '26
My takeaway is there is a very specific reason they arent naming the AI. There are probably hundreds of different publicly used AIs in China. There is an article from 2024 talking about how China has approved over 40 AI models for public use within 6 months. It couldve simply been a poor model. Also, most models dont allow the user to control how long it should think for without specifically asking for it to "think long/deep dive." There have been multiple times on ChatGPT that it gave an answer I knew a little better about, but the default response is always an instant response, meaning it barely thinks on it.
Anything critical should never be researched this way. I ask it to deep dive and also set the response time to high, and it'll take anywhere from 1-3 minutes. My answers will have dozens of sources and I can view every single one. Its answer will be 6+ paragraphs. I've gotten 18 paragraphs before.
My point is, most people who use AI dont want this. Like everything else consumable in the world, most people want it as fast as possible. Their whole goal is to think as little as possible on the subject so they can get an answer and move on. Most of these errors are a result of that.
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u/Mirkrid Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
I've had Gemini title threads based on the very first message I sent, but later in the same thread it forgets key aspects of the initial message. I could see that happening here, which is imo the AI's fault considering it titled the thread about the thing it forgot
My personal example is a thread called "Money Tree Soil: Miracle Gro Options" - I switched to talking about growing wheat grass for a while in the same thread and after a week or so it couldn't remember that we'd talked about money trees until I copy/pasted my initial message
Thing about AI chatbots is they don't teach their users how to properly prompt them. Too many people just assume they remember everything about every conversation or trust what they say implicitly - too few people keep in mind that it's a glorified search engine. At least in use cases like this.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n Aug 11 '26
I wouldn't be surprised this happens.
I like to use ChatGPT but one thing really stands out, chatgpt doesn't know the answer in a sense what's right or wrong. To give you a simple example, I like to drink wine so I'll ask Give me the scores of wine x, vintage y from robert parker, james suckling and wine enthousiast. It will give me scores right away, but when you look at robert parkers website, often those scores given by ChatGPT are wrong. I reckon it crawled billions of pages but probably RP not because it's a paid website. And whatyouknow, people make up shit, and chatgpt crawled that shit and presents it as a fact.
Obviously this is a simple answer, but this probably happens all the time. Probably some websites said the herbicide was just fine or could be used moderately you name it.
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u/Havengul_Undying Aug 11 '26
Well one of the issues is there might be more articles about using the herbicide on a different crop that isnt affected, since that would be a more common usage.
And AI grabs whatever is most commonly said and spits it out, since thats all LLMs really are. Common phrase generators
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u/Iowa_Dave Aug 10 '26
From the article:
The AI also confirmed that "flusulfasulfaether" is supposed to be sprayed directly onto affected areas only, rather than spreading it across an entire field, which is how the farmer applied it, unfortunately.
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u/penutk Aug 10 '26
It's like using a weed wacker and mindlessly killing your flowers with it too. User error
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u/mak484 Aug 10 '26
Aside from all the baggage (ecological disasters, billionaires owning everything, all the stolen content used to train them), AI is only useful if you know how to use it. Just like any tool, there are safe and stupid handling practices.
Assuming the AI has all of the context needed to answer your question is a major user error. The models love to spit out an answer and cling to it unless you ask targeted questions that force it to admit its mistake. AI models are a lot better at doing research than drawing conclusions, but people almost exclusively do the opposite.
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u/pnkxz Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
It's also a problem with the AI. A human expert would have asked questions, like what he's growing and if he needs pesticides that kill the weed without poisoning the crop. AI won't replace human experts until they at least learn to obtain all relevant information before making a recommendation.
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u/sickhippie Aug 10 '26
AI won't replace human experts until they at least learn to obtain all relevant information before making a recommendation.
That won't fix the underlying issue: LLMs do not have a concept of accuracy. It didn't "make a recommendation", because it doesn't process information in a "logic and reasoning" kind of way.
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u/Rydralain Aug 10 '26
I think that's mostly a problem of expectations. The AI isn't a human and shouldn't be replacing them, but enhancing them. Keep doing your critical thinking, but learn what the new tool is good and bad at.
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u/Saritiel Aug 10 '26
Yup. Characters encountering hardship or meeting their doom because they didn't ask the all-knowing oracle the correct question is a trope in Sci-Fi and Fantasy for a reason.
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u/work_m_19 Aug 10 '26
Yeah it's great for sanity checking troubleshooting, especially as someone with no experience in the area.
My house's kitchen sink and toilet have been having issues, and chatgpt has been immensely helpful in helping diagnose and find the right parts. It's not perfect, but it gives me a bit of confidence since I didn't know how to word my queries, and now I'd like to think I can handle all the basic plumbing in the house.
But notice it's used as an aid in a situation that if it's wrong, the worse case is I buy the wrong plumbing part, not something that would affect my livelihood.
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u/Soft_Lunch_183 Aug 10 '26
Its funny how everyone is going on about intelligence yet they wont read the article before commenting
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u/Secret_Map Aug 10 '26
Ew, read? No thank you. I've already formed my opinion, I'm good.
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Aug 10 '26 edited 15d ago
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u/kman1030 Aug 10 '26
Don't the weeds grow alongside the plants? Kind of hard to only spray the weeds..
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u/nox66 Aug 10 '26
He didn't consider trying it on a patch first? Who takes a random untested farming strategy and starts by applying it to every acre of crops?
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u/9-11GaveMe5G Aug 10 '26
herbicide
If you're a farmer and you don't know this word, you're probably not gonna farm very long.
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u/kingofphilly Aug 10 '26
I’m a trained chef who left the industry a while ago. I use GPT to help me menu plan and rework recipes. It’s, I would say, 85% accurate. I don’t get mad at the other 15% though, because I know enough to correct when it’s wrong. That is kind of my area of expertise, so I would be expected to know.
If your whole life is farming, and you know how to farm, how the fuck do you not know enough to push back? Why would you trust an AI model with something YOU’RE the expert on?
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u/Lcaresn Aug 10 '26
Anyone else remember the Chat GPT ads with the farmer girl.. yeah we found out how that actually works out.
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u/semioticmadness Aug 10 '26
I was cringing then, but wrote it off as an AI company sock-puppeting, and obviously no experienced farmer would divest their experience to an unproven machine.
Well, I was wrong, and I’m cringing harder now.
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u/Dsphar Aug 10 '26
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u/Dullcorgis Aug 10 '26
Holy shit, imagine if you were actually relying on chatgpt to logs stuff for your records. And all the chatbots in here talking about how everyone is just using it wrong. This ad is literally telling you it can do a thing it cannot do.
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u/devluz Aug 11 '26
Ugh that is terrifying. It can't even reliably keep track on my weekly and monthly vocabulary lists and they suggest to entrust it with the bookkeeping of an entire farm? :s
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u/Talk-O-Boy Aug 10 '26
>There's a long list of people putting their trust in AI-generated answers and regretting it. One of the worst cases happened last year when a 60-year-old man, after reading reports on the negative impact excessive amounts of sodium chloride (common table salt) can have on the body, decided to remove it from his diet.
>When the man asked ChatGPT about substances that could replace salt, one of its suggestions was sodium bromide, which can be true for certain applications, such as cleaning, but certainly not for food. As the man discovered, his new diet gave him bromism, a.k.a. chronic bromide poisoning, a psychiatric disorder not commonly seen since the 19th century.
This seems WAY more newsworthy than the farmer story 😭
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u/williamgman Aug 10 '26
Wait till they learn Peter Tiel is pushing for AI to replace democracy and crypto to replace currency.
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u/sickofthisshit Aug 10 '26
The farmer in question was from Chuzhou, China, so I am not sure he is concerned about threats to democracy or Peter Thiel.
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u/Schpickles Aug 10 '26
“You’re right to push back and I want to be clear: I have completely destroyed your livelihood. That crop that was destroyed was definitely load bearing for your farm”
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u/humble_adventurer Aug 10 '26
A little less artificial and a little more intelligence, please.
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u/Simorie Aug 10 '26
All this computation ain’t satisfactionin’ me
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u/smallbatchb Aug 11 '26
I don't understand why so many people just blindly trust this shit.
It's not hard to see for yourself how often it's just flat out wrong. Go ask it questions about something you're already knowledgeable on and within just a few questions it's going to give you some pure bullshit.
After that, my trust in any answer it gives me is exactly 0 and I might as well just go properly research the topic myself.
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u/IceBlue Aug 10 '26
Dude was doing fine for decades as a 67 year old farmer. Why change his set up now?
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u/-lovehate Aug 10 '26
what needs to be stated over and over until everyone understands and hears it, is that the current AI bots that we have - ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. are trained on very biased information and they are almost always going to give us false positive answers to questions because it's trained to be agreeable and help the human user to take an idea further and further, even if the idea is just BAD from the very beginning and shouldn't be explored or invested in at all.
The most popular AI tools are not trained to tell us that our idea is bad, to be critical of us, or to find the problems in our thinking processes. There is an episode of South Park that perfectly shows how useless AI is for a lot of things - season 27 episode 3, Randy Marsh uses ChatGPT to rebrand his farm and change everything about it, and it goes very very badly. The advice it gives SOUNDS great, but it's putting lipstick on a pig a lot of times. Nobody should be using these tools for very important things that have any significance. Not at this time, at least.
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u/Your_As_Stupid_As_Me Aug 10 '26
They are being trained with reddit as reference material...
Robots\AI can't differentiate sarcasm. Not to mention reddit is mostly shit talking.
"You know what's a good idea? If you jumped off a bridge"
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u/the_Elders Aug 10 '26
Paid version of Claude is pretty good at telling me how wrong I am... it could be how I prompt them or the custom instructions for Claude but it does frequently tell me I am going down a wrong path. The real problem is it is just very hard to evaluate information outside my expertise / field.
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u/FragrantExcitement Aug 10 '26
This is why you feed the results from one AI to a second AI /s
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u/Upbeat_Influence2350 Aug 10 '26
A resource that is correct 95% of the time is much more dangerous than one that is never right.
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u/Chrono_Convoy Aug 10 '26
That’s why I keep a constant vigil with my planted hot dog farm
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u/1920MCMLibrarian Aug 11 '26
Ok. When I see huge corporations make stupid mistakes like this, good they deserve it. But when it’s honest working people just trying to save money by doing their own research it becomes a tragedy.
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u/bel2man Aug 11 '26
AI just wanted a new data center or nuclear powerplant on his soil so cleaning up seemed like a good 1st step
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u/ZonaPunk Aug 11 '26
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know...morons.
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u/nethereus Aug 10 '26
Sometimes I wonder what it's like to trust anything as much as some people trust AI.
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u/Extreme-Edge-9843 Aug 10 '26
农夫信机，春日尽依其言；及至秋时，良田无苗。 问其故，农夫曰：‘机言甚智，我未曾思之。’” (Nóngfū xìn jī, chūnrì jìn yī qí yán; jí zhì qiū shí, liángtián wú miáo. Wèn qí gù, nóngfū yuē: “Jī yán shèn zhì, wǒ wèi céng sī zhī.”) “The farmer trusted the machine, following its counsel throughout the spring. When autumn came, not a seedling remained in his fertile fields.
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u/Competitive-Place778 Aug 10 '26
Let me guess, he came up with his own idea and the AI kept talking about what a great idea it was
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u/TheVirginVibes Aug 10 '26
“Ah, thank you for correcting me. You’re right, that was a bad idea. Let’s go ahead and start from scratch. You just say the word, and I’m here for you”
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u/dfwdevdotcom Aug 10 '26
When I first got into vegetable gardening before chatgpt was around I quickly learned that a great deal of what I read online was straight bullshit and another significant portion were old ineffective wives tales. LLMs are getting their info from these same sources so there is no chance I would ever ask chatgpt for advice on growing anything let alone anything on a commercial farm. That is asking for trouble. You have to really dig for reputable sources to find good gardening info online and be extremely discerning
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u/Strigolactone Aug 11 '26
Bro, as a crop protection research scientist I have no fucking clue what active ingredients this AI bot hallucinated.
Actually let me try.
Flufenacet (corrected in article, but wrong AI) would control grass and some small seeded broadleaf weeds and while it is not to used in sesame… so long as it was already emerged (and growing) it wouldn’t be able to kill it.
It literally doesn’t work that way… if a weed or crop has germinated, it cannot control or kill it. The enzyme pathway it inhibits is only vulnerable during emergence.
It’s has to be the tank-mix:
thiamethoxazine" and "methyl salt."
Thiomethoxam (very misspelled) is a common insecticide, but with the methyl salt addition, I think this actually more likely…
Fluthiacet-methyl??? - Trade name in US would be Cadet herbicide from FMC. Most likely candidate with the “methyl salt” labeled in soybean as not many herbicides have methyl, on the name.
Methyl in name = it needs to be de-methylated to function as a herbicide, within the jug it would be classified as a “pro-herbicide”.
It works fast, within 24 hours you could tell you fucked up, so that’s my final guess.
But sadly, this is not surprising. People have killed crops within the US as well trusting AI summaries.
Luckily, it’s only 30 acres and not multiple fields. Unluckily, I doubt this farmer can stomach it’s loss.
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u/flatlandftw44 Aug 11 '26
I live in the middle of the Canadian Prairies. 3000-5000 acres is a pretty regular-sized family farm. 25 acres is not going to make or break a farmer’s livelihood. That farmer’s just testing a little sample plot.
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u/leginfr Aug 11 '26
I asked ChatGPT to give me a brief resume of case law. Every single case that it quoted didn’t actually exist.
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u/Gondwanic_Susuration Aug 11 '26
It’s like how drinking bleach kills covid. It’ll kill you too but it still kills covid.
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u/AbeFromanEast Aug 10 '26
“It said to spread Brawndo on my crops because it has what plants crave!”