Wow. Who would take the liability of an app such as this? Regardless of how many disclaimers you'd have to agree to I could easily see a jury holding the creator of the app liable for a horrible death like that.
I dunno, watching the video linked by this use [0], I think the apps (aside from Google Lens) do a fairly okay job of being clear that they aren't as sure on their identification and that they're about casualness, not "safe to eat or not safe to eat."
While the article cites some persons who ate poisonous mushrooms because an app said they weren't poisonous, ultimately it will come down to "Did the app sell itself as telling you what's safe to eat and what's not?"
From the video, I'm particularly harsh towards Google on this as it doesn't seem to include the confidence level or analysis process and instead focused on showing a result and even trying to sell you something based on the result. This does seem like it's the wrong approach that will get people killed, with thoughts like "well Google thinks it's this, and it's even trying to sell me some, so must be okay."
For the others, you can see warnings in the apps about eating identified stuff, you can see how confident it is in the analysis, and they at least appear to be considering things like the region you're in when making an analysis.
I think it would be fairly defensible based on the warnings and preparation that a reasonable person would not be expected to take the identification as a go-ahead to eat something. That unreasonable persons take unreasonable actions as a result of these apps wouldn't really change the legal interpretation, but of course maybe it can be persuasive in other directions.
At first I shared the same opinion as you that these are dangerous apps, but watching what the apps do in the linked video, the non-google ones are actually pretty acceptable in my opinion. I would prefer they include a few more warnings though when there is low confidence matching or when there is conflicting matching just to remind the person using the app "hey, btw, a lot of plants can kill you. Don't eat this, I'm just an app."
It's literally part of the iphone camera, if you weren't aware. Not disagreeing with you, but acknowledging that it's pretty hard to prevent these apps with how accessible machine learning is today, despite accuracy still being difficult for many things.
While the article cites some persons who ate poisonous mushrooms because an app said they weren't poisonous, ultimately it will come down to "Did the app sell itself as telling you what's safe to eat and what's not?"
From the video, I'm particularly harsh towards Google on this as it doesn't seem to include the confidence level or analysis process and instead focused on showing a result and even trying to sell you something based on the result. This does seem like it's the wrong approach that will get people killed, with thoughts like "well Google thinks it's this, and it's even trying to sell me some, so must be okay."
For the others, you can see warnings in the apps about eating identified stuff, you can see how confident it is in the analysis, and they at least appear to be considering things like the region you're in when making an analysis.
I think it would be fairly defensible based on the warnings and preparation that a reasonable person would not be expected to take the identification as a go-ahead to eat something. That unreasonable persons take unreasonable actions as a result of these apps wouldn't really change the legal interpretation, but of course maybe it can be persuasive in other directions.
At first I shared the same opinion as you that these are dangerous apps, but watching what the apps do in the linked video, the non-google ones are actually pretty acceptable in my opinion. I would prefer they include a few more warnings though when there is low confidence matching or when there is conflicting matching just to remind the person using the app "hey, btw, a lot of plants can kill you. Don't eat this, I'm just an app."
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33220688