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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> The mini-explosion of AI mushrooms apps is emblematic of a larger trend toward adding AI into products that might not benefit from it — from tax software to therapy appointments.

Oh, dear. Yeah, none of that is going to go well. Kind of surprised that Apple and Google haven’t put their foot down about the mushroom identification and therapy, at least; that’ll get people killed. And I wouldn’t want to be the person whose argument to the tax authorities for their dodgy return was that a magic box said it was okay…

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I bet my government is already salivating at the idea of replacing thousands of their own (unionized, pensioned) tax employees with AI. Then we'll be in the Kafkesque hell of "am I going to jail because my AI tax assistant is wrong, or the government's AI tax processor is wrong?"

I've already gotten one recruiter email from an AI tax prep startup, which is just a hilariously bad idea. Hallucinate yourself all the way to prison.

Worth noting that "Huggingface" the company got it's name from and started as an attempt to use LLMs for therapy.

Did it actually? Maybe it's for the best they pivoted, then, because that name is somewhat unfortunate. Calls to mind the facehugger from Alien... not exactly the ideal therapist.

I legitimately thought "huggingface" was an Alien reference.

Is this true? I thought it was just named after the emoji. I knew they had a chatbot product at one point but I didn’t think it was for therapy.

I feel like there are PLENTY of "AI" apps someone could have made and still been first to market, long before they got down the list to "eat this fungus, trust me bro" territory.

Why? It already decides if you get into a school, get a loan, get past the screening for a job and heck, if you're online dating, who your potential life partners are. You might as well eat the mushroom, bro. You trust it for everything else.

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