Expert: Cleveland Clinic clinical guidance on poison hemlock (Conium maculatum), cited in the Times of India report, Reference medical guidance; case account published by Kristi (@rawbeautybykristi), friend of the gardener This is not a hallucinated fact. It is a confident answer to a question the model could not answer, and the safest possible answer - wild carrot - was the one it chose. Every feature ChatGPT gave for carrot is shared by poison hemlock. Both are in the carrot family and both have finely divided, feathery, parsley-like leaves; hemlock is routinely mistaken for wild carrot, wild parsnip and wild parsley precisely because those leaves look alike. The marker that separates them is the stem - hollow, with purple splotches, on a plant that can reach 2 to 10 feet - and that is not something a photograph of leaves settles. When the gardener wrote that those features were visible in the photos she had sent, the chatbot dismissed the possibility anyway and repeated that she had carrot foliage growing in a school garden. The clearest sign that the answer was sampled rather than measured: the same photographs, put to a second ChatGPT session on a phone, came back poisonous. Google Lens read the same images as poison hemlock. A plant does not change species between two prompts. Cleveland Clinic's guidance on Conium maculatum is blunt. Every part of the plant is poisonous - seeds, root, stem, leaves and fruit - and it can be fatal if ingested, even in small amounts. Severe symptoms can begin within 15 minutes: sweating, vomiting, dilated pupils, excess salivation, rapid heartbeat, high blood pressure, confusion, muscle twitching, tremors and seizures. The alkaloids paralyse the neuromuscular junctions that carry signals from nerve to muscle; when the breathing muscles fail, breathing stops. In severe cases there is muscle paralysis, kidney failure and central nervous system depression. There is no antidote - treatment is mechanical ventilation, antiseizure medication, hemodialysis, a digestive cleanse and IV fluids - and there is no test for it, so diagnosis rests on symptoms and exposure history. No ingestion is reported in this incident; the danger was the reassurance itself, delivered with stated certainty over and over, in the direction of an edible plant. "It not only said it was POSITIVE it doubled down over and over CONFIRMING with ABSOLUTE certainty that it was in fact NOT poison hemlock, that it was IN FACT wild carrot," the friend wrote in the caption that carried the story to roughly half a million followers. "They are not your friend, they are not to be trusted, they are not helpful, they are awful and they could cause severe harm." The correction is about scope, not accuracy rate. An edible-plant decision has no error budget: the failure mode is not a wrong answer, it is a wrong answer delivered confidently enough that nobody checks. Photo identification by a general-purpose chatbot is pattern-matching against training images, and it cannot inspect a stem, smell the plant, or know that a hemlock seed can re-sprout from a mown patch. If a plant's identity decides whether it goes into a meal, confirm it with a botanist, a university extension service or a poison control centre - and if there is any doubt at all, do not eat it. Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/etimes/trending/chatgpt-nearly-kills-woman-after-giving-confident-advice-about-a-poisonous-plant/articleshow/127548169.cms