• Those flowers are sending off some form of primitive flight or fight response in my brain. Their appearance is unnatural and unsettling.

    • 1 day

      To be fair some real flowers look very weird, but those fake ones look like muppets.

    • Do you want Little Shop of Horrors? Because this is how you get Little Shop of Horrors!

  • Don’t buy seeds on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc - they are so full of scammers that it is impossible to weed out the legitimate sellers from the fake. And if you get fake ones, you may get invasive species that are harmful to the environment around you.

    Most places have some great local sellers. But if you’re buying online I would recommend dedicated places like Canada’s Vesey’s Seeds, West Coast Seeds, or the US’s Prairie Moon

    • Someone gifted me a bonsai kit off amazon that i cant use because every single seed packet is an invasive plant in my area. Unless the person who gifted it to me looked up every plant type, which is a big ask for them ability-wise, there was no way for them to have known from the product listing.

      • If you don’t let it propagate or put it in the ground, how is it being invasive hindering you from growing it as a bonsai.
        It’s literally potted and pruned and brought up as a house plant.

  • These free-for-all marketplaces are just going to suffocate under a barrage of scams. Ebay is already the world’s biggest stolen goods fence.

  • Yet another reason to plant seeds of species that are native to your region, and purchase them from reputable sources

      • 2 days

        Are you saying that the thing that is only good at lying and creating fake images/videos is good at scamming ? I am shocked !

    • 2 days

      This can’t be AI. AI only creates forgeries of existing art! It’s incapable of creating anything new; I have it on good authority. Plus we’d know if AI had been used because all the water would be gone, the art stolen, and electricity would become unaffordable everywhere.

      I’ve never used it and never will.

  • 2 days

    I wish I didn’t have ethics more often than I am proud of, I could’ve been scamming people for years and made a very comfy life for myself

  • 1 day

    Oh hell no, let this scam live. The more people that get fucked over by AI, the more chance we’ll have of making the fucking point.

  • 2 days

    Back in my day you got ripped off buying seeds from scammers good at Photoshop.

      • 1 day

        You know, the tomatoes… not on the same plant, but we could GMO some crazy ass tomatoes.

        ThoughtEmporium, can you make us some glow in the dark tomatoes?

        • Not those blues, purples or greens.

          I’m growing some “The Eleven” tomatoes this year, which is a hybrid of a cherry tomato that was spliced with a Snapdraon flower to have higher levels of the anthocyanin, the antioxidant that’s found in many blue produce.

      • 2 days

        A slightly different shade of a flower is not THAT unreasonable.

  • funny how its mostly flowers that are either sunflowers, or daisies, are moslty in the asteracae family, not any other. succulents are mostly propagated by cuttings, or offshoots, rather than seeds because succulent from seeds takes a very long time to grow.

  • If someone needs to use generative AI to market a product, then that product doesn’t exist.

    • 2 days

      I don’t think the product actually existing is something scammers are typically concerned about

      • But it’s a good rule of thumb for consumers. or at least for us to tell our parents.

    • 2 days

      I test products for a major online retailer, the amount of AI generated images is too damn high! Some of these producs are so bad I just give them away once the retention period (when you cannot sell or give them) is up. But sometimes you get some pretty good surprises (like those electric insect bite healer devices, that works surprising well).

  • 2 days

    Used to buy succulent seeds online, and sadly there were a fair number of scammers selling seeds for what appeared to be gorgeous, but non-existent photoshopped succulents.

    Scammers gotta scam, and AI makes it easy.

  • Even before AI, this was a scam. Photoshopped pics. Fake seeds for legit plants, like wasabi, that are harder to find. And so on.