The promise of artificial intelligence is here, but at times it seems like more of a curse than a blessing for reasons like this: A farmer in China says advice from an AI assistant on pesticides accidentally killed 25 acres of his crop, according to an article in Yahoo Tech.
The 67-year-old grower in Anhui province had been using AI software for a year prior to the incident to ask for advice on everything from scheduling to fertilizing. Initial success led to him trusting the AI and, according to journalists, blindly following its instructions without confirming the information with other sources.
After asking about the best course of treatment for controlling weeds and pests on sesame crops, AI suggested a treatment plan that destroyed a large field of seedlings.
Agricultural experts attributed the error to a herbicide called flufenacet, which can be harmful to sesame fields if not used in a targeted manner. “The weeds and seedlings died together, and the seedlings died even faster,” the farmer told a Taiwanese news outlet.
The unnamed AI app he used apparently carried a warning at the top of the dialogue page that stated: “AI generation may be incorrect, please verify.”
The moral of the story? Any time you assume new technology is going to make farming easy and nuance-free, you’re probably wrong. We got into this trouble with herbicide resistance, thinking a new technology would be bulletproof. But now we’re left a legacy of voracious, defiant weeds.
Artificial intelligence has enormous potential in agriculture — to make farmers better managers, not replace them. There was a lot of promise shown in the technology during the Elevate summit at Grand Farm last month, which we'll be writing about in our October newsletter. AI can take enormous sets of data and make complex decisions a million times faster than farmers can. But these tools may not understand agronomy or context the way farmers do.
Right now, it’s best to think of AI as a tool, rather than use it as a crutch to wash over poor farm management.
