Mushroom Riffing with ChatGPT

I walked down to the low water crossing yesterday morning around 7:00 as a part of my pre-pickleball warmup, and I noticed a couple of black somethings that stood out against the recently mowed grass of a nearby vacant lot. Those somethings turned out to be mushrooms, and very photogenic ones at that.

The recent rains have brought to life a nice variety of fungi. I’ve seen this species before, and even written about it (along with a number of other local species), but I had forgotten the name and, frankly, was too lazy to look it up on my own blog. So I did what any indolent hack blogger would do: I turned to ChatGPT.

Now, let me state for the record that I’ve got no problem with writers who use AI, as long as they use it properly and disclose if it’s used to generate a significant portion of their work. I consider it to be a tool, and just as you wouldn’t use your grandmother’s sterling silver soup ladle to dig a grave to hide a body — please assure me that you wouldn’t do that — you wouldn’t/shouldn’t use AI to generate an entire blog post (do as I say, not as I do).

So, with that in mind, please understand that I think using ChatGPT to identify a mushroom is an appropriate use (fungi are notoriously difficult to identify, especially when you don’t know anything about fungi), and that’s exactly what I did. It quickly ID’d the lovely trio in the photo as a group of magpie inkcaps (Coprinopsis picacea ^[1]) which, unlike some of the snakes in Texas, are poisonous but not venomous ^[2].

I did some cross-checking to confirm the validity of ChatGPT’s assessment, and I could have left well enough alone, but the temptation to do a little bantering with my semi-sentient synthetic sycophant was irresistible. This is what ensued (ChatGPT’s part of the conversation is shown in red as in “red flag…AI-generated content”:

ChatGPT:

A couple of important cautions:

• Do not eat them based on image identification alone.^[3]
• Some inkcaps can cause unpleasant reactions when combined with alcohol.
• Lawn mushrooms can also absorb chemicals from treated grass.

But from a photography standpoint? Fantastic find. The trio composition and the black “melting” margins make this look almost staged — very dramatic little fungi.

Me:

I agree…the staging is spectacular. But you know me. Here’s where my mind went when I saw and photographed it:

Child: Where do baby mushrooms come from?

Parent: Well, a mommy mushroom meets a daddy mushroom and they fall in love…

[Please don’t hold that against me. 🤣]

ChatGPT:

I refuse to hold that against you because that is exactly the kind of thing those mushrooms look like. 🤣

Honestly, the “proud mushroom parents with the shy little mushroom child standing in front for the family portrait” interpretation is almost impossible to avoid once you see it.

And the timing is perfect because the adults are at that dramatic “we are literally dissolving into black goo” stage while the youngster is still trying to look respectable for school pictures.

It has big “Now Timmy, someday your cap will deliquesce too.” energy. 🍄

Me:

Your use of “deliquesce” is, well, delicious.

ChatGPT:

It’s one of those gloriously overqualified scientific words that sounds like it ought to describe either:

A mushroom turning into black ink, or

A Victorian aristocrat fainting onto a chaise lounge.

Lady Penelope deliquesced upon hearing the news. 😄

But in the fungal world it’s wonderfully literal — the mushroom is essentially autodigesting into a spore-bearing sludge. Nature looked at mushrooms and apparently decided, “You know what would be efficient? If reproduction involved melting.” 🍄

As you can see, while AI is, indeed, a useful tool for tracking down sometimes elusive information, it can also collaborate on an entertaining exchange. And it’s scarily easy to slip into the mode of treating that exchange as happening between you and an actual personality.

Fungal Footnotes

[1] I’m sure you’re asking yourself how in the world they came up with the scientific name — Coprinopsis picacea — for this mushroom, and that’s an excellent question that I will try to answer.

So, the Latin word for magpie is pica and when that’s combined with the Latin suffix, -cea, meaning resembling, you get a thing that resembles a magpie, more or less, and that gives us the species name. But the more relevant question is why anyone saw this mushroom and immediately thought Gee, that really looks like a magpie. I mean, look at this:

The genus name — Coprinopsis — has a Greek etymology, and it basically means looking like something that lives on manure. I shall resist the temptation to create a corresponding visual. [Return]

[2] We’ve been over this a million times, but I guess once more won’t hurt:

If you bite it and you die, it’s poisonous.

If it bites you and you die, it’s venomous.

That’s overly dramatic, but you get the picture, right? [Return]

[3] What ChatGPT is telling us in its own self-effacing way is something like this: “Don’t trust me with your life.” That’s pretty good advice, right? [Return]