Nature's version of Ai-generated deepfakes 😳
These coastal shrubs appear to blooming profusely with pink flower clusters in various shades and stages of development...from a distance.
Just like a closer look at an Ai-generated picture reveals subtle discrepancies (wrong number of fingers, uncanny valley, oddly placed fixtures, or physically incorrect optics), a second glance at these real-life deep fakes shows similarly incongruous details.
Meet Exobasidium, a fungus who hijacks the flowering function of a particular species to produce fake fruit/buds (galls) and obscenely engorged flowers (fruiting bodies) to trick pollinators into spore dispersal.
This mycological organism, without the benefit of "eyes," has taken mimicry to the next level by acquiring enough biological data to come up with a good, but not quite convincing, mime of the real thing. It's a bizarrely unsettling phenomenon and yet another example of the prowess of fungal minds totally outpacing the bounds of human tech.
"Deepfakes" are apparently as old as the first mycological surveillance on angiosperms...
