AI eating AI?

I recently gave a yerba buena (Clinopodium douglasii) plant to a neighbor. I think this is the 5th yerba buena plant I’ve given away so far in the past year? This is one of my favorite California native plants.

The neighbor asked me whether it’s safe for cats so I did some research online. Reiterating what I said on Linkedin, I was happy when Google initially responded to [yerba buena cat safety] with a “featured snippet” saying “Yerba Buena is cat-safe, confirmed by veterinary science and ASPCA.” (However, as you’ll see, I would find this *not* to be true.)

The snippet was identified as coming from a greg.app page titled “Yerba Buena Is Not Toxic To Cats” (Archive). Following the link for that, I started to get a little worried. The text felt off. Especially glaring was this bit: “Differentiate from toxic look-alikes like Yucca to protect cats.”

This is yerba buena:

This is a yucca:

If you’re talking about mixing up yerba buena and yucca, nothing else you say is trustworthy, I think… (Also, the photos on the greg.app page don’t look much like yerba buena to me either. One of them is getting picked up in the featured snippet captured above.)

Following the links from the byline listed for the page, I see she is a co-creator of greg.app. On its support page (Archive), it’s described as “a personalized plant care AI that puts plant care on autopilot. Use Greg to know when to water your plants, how much light they need, and when to fertilize.”

Maybe if AI is being used to produce watering suggestions, it is also being used to generate these pages about plant safety? At least the text reads as very ChatGPT-ty to me.

What does the ASPCA actually say? You can search for safety info on plants on their Poisonous Plants page. Searching for [yerba buena] leads to a generic page for mints, which makes sense since Clinipodium douglasii is in the mint family Lamiaceae. And the ASPCA page for mint says:

Toxicity: Toxic to Dogs, Toxic to Cats, Toxic to Horses

Toxic Principles: Essential Oils

Emphasis added. ASPCA Mint

Interestingly, the greg.app page did potentially pick up on the “Essential Oils” aspect. “Essential oils and other plant constituents might be irritating to some cats if ingested in large quantities.”

Looking at Google again for [yerba buena plant safety], we see that the AI Overview also is confidently asserting that it’s safe, citing the greg.app page as the source.

To me, this example is interesting because it could be an example of AI ingesting and regurgitating a hallucination from another AI.

A less interesting possibility, I suppose, is that the greg.app is more template-based than AI-based. The text may be true in this respect… maybe this specific plant isn’t on an ASPCA list of dangerous plants. (But we can hardly expect those lists to be comprehensive… that’s why it makes sense for the ASPCA to cover stuff at the level of plant family.)

Finally, though, although the featured snippet and AI overview seem misleading to me, searching for [how dangerous is mint for cats] on Google led me to this Reddit comment:

Mint isn’t super toxic to cats unless in large amounts, and like in pre toxic big amounts it causes the tummy ache times, so puking and diarrhea and sometimes a lack of appetite. I have mint plants around my cats and they’re fine but I’d be careful with oils and concentrate because they’re more concentrated than the occasional mint leaf …

https://www.reddit.com/r/CATHELP/comments/1biq94i/comment/kvm3x5z/ Thank you, johnsum1998! I hope you are a real human being.

So, we shouldn’t say it’s non-toxic, probably, but maybe not so bad either?

I think this Reddit comment is the best answer I found on my journey (though the ASPCA page helps a lot too). I find that kind of funny given it’s almost a cliche in some circles that adding “reddit” to your search yields better results — maybe I’ll have to start giving it more of a try though.