Hostas do not look like this! And please don’t try these in your “font yard.”
My friend Stephanie Fleming, the former owner of the Behnkes Nursery that closed in 2019 and is MUCH missed, recently told me about a new problem that garden centers are facing: “You know, the industry is having a fit with all the AI generated plants. I hear from other owners all the time how upset people get when they bring in a photo of a plant and are told it is a fake plant.” (She also wrote about it on her blog.)
OMG, people think these are real!
My Instagram and Facebook feeds are so full of these horrible fake gardens that I’m frantically clicking “not interested” every chance I get.
Even extremely ugly images like these are getting shared!
Now let’s see how AI gardens compare with real ones posted by legit accounts, like House & Garden Magazine, below center and right.
Notice the knock-off account on the left, pretending to be the popular magazine, with its fake garden image. The difference between real and AI-generated gardens is so clear.
Finally, I don’t know about you, but when I see the words “insect garden,” this is not what comes to mind.
AI Garden Design Apps for Us?
Leaving the ugly world of my social media feeds, I still wonder if the new AI apps can help us design our gardens. Has anyone tried one they can recommend?
This one – Home Designs AI – doesn’t exactly inspire me to try it.
What I find annoying are those obviously fake blue, purple and neon colored flowers and vegetables offered for sale on line. I wonder how many people have bought these and ended up very disappointed.
Just like the pictures in the old mail order catalogues of questionable reputation.
Remindsvme of ornate beds at Versailles, or Victorian beds in geometric shapes that are bedded out three times a year. Tulips and pansies, torn out for geraniums and marigolds then mums. All spaced perfectly.
Backlash to the native meadow look?
No one working in AI has gardens so hasn’t a clue?
Some folks have always liked this style of planting. As for plants that don’t exist, it’s up to the nursery to show them ones that do exist and where they are going to grow best.
If this AI stuff gets more people outside, good.
Regarding whether people working in AI have gardens or have a clue: they don’t program these ideas into AI. AI is trained on the biggest corpus of images (or written words) that can be acquired. No human employees have much control over what’s included. I guess there are lots more images of real-life or human-photoshopped geometric gardens like this than we expected. Maybe they’re popular in other countries.
RHLF (Reinforcement learning from human feedback) trains the AI to be less likely to give certain things as output (e.g. pornography, despite the immense quantity of that that AI doubtless ingests). I guess in theory they could RHLF a preference against giving us designs like this. But that’s way further into matters of subjective taste than is currently reasonable or affordable for them to do.
A practical way for users to narrow the outputs they get is to use a more descriptive prompt. For example, rather than just “insect garden,” try something like “insect garden, naturalistic, native, Mid-Atlantic, august, plant list, design, fine gardening” or something like that.
I do not wish to view an ai response to most of my queries. I was thrilled to learn this little clicking trick on Instagram..’.it’s clear that AI searches have an environmental cost. i was surprised when google started using it automatically for us even when we hadn’t asked it to. i’m glad to have learned a simple and easy way to avoid that. (the quotes are only part of my post, you just leave a space after the last word of your search, type the minus sign and then a lower case a and i right after, no spaces)’
I’m a gardener AND a software engineer, so I can address this bit:
| No one working in AI has gardens so hasn’t a clue?
AI works in such a way it is generating content *without* much in the way of human expertise. It takes in millions of images of gardens/plants and then generates content based on prompts. The model is trained on that data, some of that is in the way of human input providing guidelines but they are not to the degree of “hydrangeas are never yellow” or anything like that. There is no actual expertise behind it – it is simply a matter of the quality of the content input, and how well the learning models work to interpret that content and the prompt from the user.
This is why AI frequently “hallucinates” things that are absurd to humans. There is no genuine understanding behind the AI, so an absurd image is no different to it than a good one.
These images are hideous. I can’t imagine anyone with even a shred of taste buying into this nonsense.
They remind me of the Munchkin village in the old Wizard of Oz movie.
OMG, yes!!
Sadly, my 72- year-old mother-in-law is regularly taken in by AI images of all sorts of things. I’ve had to explain to her a few times how to spot generated images.
My recommendation to people of all ages is to look for images from websites you know produce actual content, and to avoid image searches unless you are very very VERY confident you are good at spotting AI content, AND you are OK with getting it wrong because almost everyone does sometimes – even people like me who are software engineers 🙂
Good info Rebecca. Thanks for letting us not into social media know
everyone needs to shut off the computers, a smart phone being one, and get outside.
Well, now I know why I’ve seen so many unusually-colored Daylilies and Roses posted here and there and can never find them. I thought they were using photo filters!
Recent article from Tony Avent on this. What’s most interesting is that he determines the most faked plants are aroids, followed by hostas and hibsicus:
https://www.juniperlevelbotanicgarden.org/hey-eye-its-a-i-the-era-of-horticultural-con-artists/
To me, AI stands for absolutely idiotic. The images are SO fake. It makes me think of the 1960’s cartoon, “The Jetsons”. People are so disconnected from the real, natural world that they can’t recognize fake when they see it. I feel sorry them, their lives must be so devoid of real beauty.
These images are getting “better and better”. I browse on Pinterest and they keep showing me AI images of “Piet Oudolf style gardens” and they are only discernible if you look closely. I block those accounts but there’s no way to filter them out. It’s so offensive and against everything that is inspirational about gardening and garden design.