I’m not sure that I have a particular goal in bringing this up, beyond sharing yet another astonishing example of the morass of supposed “information” being spewed up by allegedly innovative people armed with an LLM and some basic web/app development skills.
In this case, it appears there’s an app called “Greg” that purports to be “the easiest way to keep plants alive” allowing you to “identify your plants in seconds and get smart, personalized care info.” From what I can tell, the developer wrote an iterative script that ingested something like the POWO taxonomy and then asked ChatGPT a half-dozen questions about plant care for each and every species.
Thanks to this fantastic initiative, I can learn all the plant care requirements for my Sisyrinchium chaguaranicum houseplant. It needs “0.8 cups [of water] every 9 days”, “love[s] being close to bright, sunny windows” but “does not tolerate low-light” and should be repotted “after it doubles in size or once a year—whichever comes first”. All this info is for free, but I can sign up to pay for “Super Greg, [which] unlocks smart, personalized water, light, and fertilizer reminders for you and your plants.”
So why am I griping here? Well Sisyrinchium chaguaranicum is not a house plant. And it’s not a garden plant either. In fact, it is essentially unknown. It was described in 2006 from “sandy-clayish soil on slopes” at 2600–2800 m near Chaguarani, in Cochabamba department, Bolivia. The description was contained in a self published journal distributed to a half-dozen academic libraries at best (I traveled to Kew to find a copy). The type specimen was apparently deposited at the National Herbarium of Bolivia, with isotypes at the New York Botanic Garden and in the collector’s own herbarium, which was later destroyed. Exhaustive research published last year suggests that all of these specimens no longer exists. There are also 0 occurrences of this plant recorded by GBIF.
All of that is unfortunate, but not especially unusual given the history of taxonomy over more than 200 years. What is new is the wholesale invention of fake information that supposedly relates to every species under the sun. Obviously, a researcher coming across the Greg page for Sisyrinchium chaguaranicum isn’t going to give it much credence. But I fear that more plausible fakes will follow, trained on a mix of genuine and fake data, and that the task of research will become a whole lot harder.
See also: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/a-i-generated-spider-identification-web-page/60552