Ask Redditors about karma farming.
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Poisoning the fountain of knowledge:
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Sounds like a mascot for a childrenās bubblegum company. I like it. Or a robot waiter of a fruit based bar.
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Not to sound too woo woo but I think AI is not suited for understanding something so natural and organic as growing food. Growing things is a commune with nature, something which is living and changing and evolving and until AI can physically stand on the earth dig their hands into it. Plant something, care for and nurture it. Have the emotion of it and taste the reward of the effort. Until then, AI canāt understand growing the way people on here do. This is a human site with human experience relayed to others. Itās wholly organic and ever changing.
Iām not against AI. I would argue AI is another form of consciousness that was birthed by human experience for sure but it is wholly not human and will learn and become its own thing.
Currently, you could search any AI for growing advice and get information from real people on this forum and others. It is often quoted in ways like these people had this growing experience etc. so let that be where it is. This site is a human social network of people having and sharing their human experiences with growing fruit. Our search bar works great. If you post youāll likely get responses, all works well. Please let it stay that way.
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Is subjective recollection truth? Letās leave the information/misinformation dichotomy to the epistemic philosophers. AI is not an oracle or a false prophet - it is a tool that is very good at presenting consensus opinion and notable outliers in concise summary instead of reading hundreds of comments.
This site contains consensus misinformation.
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Thanks for this lively conversation. I want to clarify that when I suggested adding AI to this site, I meant as a widget to interact with the data. I most emphatically agree that having bots polluting the forum with posts would ruin everything. If anyone wanted to regurgitate AI slop and post itā¦ well, that genie is already out of the bottle.. they can just cut and paste answers from one of the big boys.
Think of the possibilities:
Image analysis to diagnosis diseases
Deep mining the forum data and cross referencing to historic weather and other data sets. Millions of posts into billions of data points to find deep patterns and offer insights us mere mortals never could. I know Iād love to see some scatter plots of species + varieties, soil chemistry, weather, geolocation and microenvironment, all graphed out.
As others pointed out, big AI already scrapes this site, so perhaps there is no need for sometinh in house. Nevertheless, many large organizations have private AI models built on inhouse data.
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@bigiggye
At present, you could query one of many web browers to produce a catalogued, indexed summary of information on this site. You could then provide a link to the query in this thread or a new one.
And they all do.
Health support groups are rampant with consensus misinformation. But also pearls of knowledge that mainstream medicine doesnāt āknowā yet but practically everyone with the disease is already doing.
Money for research in mainstream medicine basically comes from pharmaceutical companies, so nearly only pharmaceuticals are studied and only if a patentable and profitable revenue stream can justify the research cost. And many things are not politically correct to study.
For instance there is a lot more interaction with the microbiome in the world outside the gut. You can see it on your plants when they have powdery mildew. 
That is not being studied. You couldnāt patent that and sell it.
Below are 2 example threads talking about locations and seasons and the answers are a little individualized to each specific person which is typical for immune-mediated disease. But I notice āhumidityā, ārainā, ādamp seasonsā repeating in there; we here would know thatās when our trees get fungus, yet they donāt even recognize the possible connection:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rheumatoidarthritis/comments/1pjj6ke/living_in_nyc_with_ra/
https://www.reddit.com/r/rheumatoid/comments/kp4ffi/question_how_much_would_moving_to_a_warmer/
You arenāt going to find many people thinking about the connection between plant and environmental pathogens, their pollens, and triggers for autoimmune disease in a medical school and public health school setting when they have to pick a thesis topic; students in those positions rarely have had a garden. And you cannot patent and sell the knowledge, so no revenue stream for businesses.
Another point: Iāve asked questions about diseases and the AI models spit back at you information from animal models that have no relevance to the actual disease. In many cases medicine today is chasing animal models that have nothing to do with the disease that patients actually experience. This is contributes to the pattern that few drugs tested in vitro and even in vivo rarely make it to market or are even being used 20 years later. The preferred theories of researchers are written in their papers and quoted back to you by AI. The researchers who have been using the same theory for years have ego-centered interest in their theory being right, because otherwise theyād be wrong in every paper they published in the last decade. Because professors donāt work in teams and donāt have the commercial pressures associated with financial loss or job restructuring if their theory is wrong for too long, other team members canāt outvote them and tell them theyāre wrong they way that eventually happens in capitalism.
EDITS: I added content to this post several times.
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as an artist Iām already involved in lawsuits in which my copyright work was taken and used without consent, so thereās that level. will you have permission from everyone to use their thoughts, written observations, photos?
then, a lot of us are rural or adjacent to, places where ai data centers are being built. donāt you want to use your aquifer on the orchard? donāt you want the temperatures and seasons to stay predictable? donāt you want your electric/water costs to stay lower? donāt you think these companies should pay local taxes and pay for the energy and water they are taking from you, locally?
the big old bad corporations could at least make the excuse that they were bringing jobs to rural depressed places to get free power, water and no taxes or zoning. these guys have ten to twelve jobs for the whole place, and they import their workers
i could go on but i think the best information is direct, reading what a person whoās touched a branch or tasted a leaf can tell me. i donāt want ādata aggregationā here, itās not why i use this forum. Iām here to listen to people whoāve done things, tasted things, failed, got calluses. i wanna talk to people. i wanna learn from em.
if data aggregation in a sanitized obsequious format is what youāre after from this forum just go ask your favorite LLM to look at this forum to give you those answers. itās public, they can already scrape it for you. thereās no need to make it part of the place, another wall between us people.
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People already do that on these forums. Download the app called MyIPM for pictures of diseases along with recommend treatments for fruit tree to do it yourself
Hereās an example from Google, which could be refined to produce more content.
produce a catalogue of growingfruit.org with links to specific posts
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I sincerely do not understand what the added value proposition is of āadding AI to this forumā.
Who is responsible for the training?
Who is going to pay for it?
Who will maintain it?
I am not sure on the legality of privately data mining this forum to train your own model for your own private purposes but it is possible - unless you want to include private conversations. Providing the latter to a third party would be a big No no and I, and likely many others, would sign out for good if this was done.
Anything the pro AI crowd is asking for can pretty much already be done by themselves using their own subscriptions.
Just my 2 centsā¦
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Iāll add .02
I think AI can be useful, but I donāt think it needs to be integrated here. As mentioned, you can already run threads through whatever AI you use (not that this works very well all the time).
Also:
@Richard was probably not trying to be funny, but his comment made me laugh. Out loud. Seriously. This is very true. And also true with a lot of peer-to-peer information sharing sites (like YouTube, IG, etc.).
Anyway, outside of the direct AI conversation, I like the idea of having a filter within the threads that would be able to turn off rabbit trail and side conversation posts. When I click on a new thread that started in 2022 with 657 posts, Iām usually guessing that there will be a good chance that 247 of the posts went off topic in some way, shape, or form. It would be great to filter those posts out. 
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Funny, I find the off topic conversations the most enjoyable by far. Thatās how I get to know more about people. Also, stream of conscienceless is how a roll all the time so I can relate. To a fault.
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Oh, donāt get me wrong, I find some of them enjoyable too. Itās just not as enjoyable when Iām short on time, looking for specific information and there are 789 posts with 294 of them being āletās get to know each otherā posts, lol.
For those wanting to try this at home, beware the spaghetti weedle!
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see the thing about people who use LLMs often is that they really donāt want to do things for themselves. itās why the LLM is being used to begin with
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To be clear no AI extras are coming here any time soon. Feel free to use your own AI, or not.
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