We planted some spinach last year, they grew, we harvested them and died since they were out of season. But as we speak I checked the garden and these grew in place of them, Bird’s Nest Fern is what they’re called apparently and I’m wondering if they’re edible or not since they were planted from the spinach seeds we sown last year. Thanks in advance for the help!



PictureThis! is the best AI plant ID I’ve found (not paying how much they want for it though). iNaturalist’s AI is pretty good too (and real experts will also help ID stuff). I haven’t tried Gemini. I tried ChatGPT and it sucked. Google Lense also sucks.
I have found PictureThis to be surprisingly accurate, even for just the tiniest shoots or a tree off in the distance. And it’s perfectly usable for free once you close the subscription screen. (But I don’t use it for anything I plan on eating.)
I have no idea what powers their identification. It must be some kind of machine learning because I can’t imagine any other kind of image recognition data set being big and labeled enough.
Edit: it doesn’t say on the app page but their social media accounts are all named PictureThisAI so I guess it is AI
Yeah, it’s likely a more “traditional” image classification model (convnet or vision-transformer, not generative AI).