Comparing ‘AI’ for Basic Plant Care With Human Brown Thumbs

Like so many of us, [Liam] has a big problem. Whether it’s the curse of Brown Thumbs or something else, those darn houseplants just keep dying despite guides always telling you how incredibly easy it is to keep them from wilting with a modicum of care each day, even without opting for succulents or cactuses. In a fit of despair [Liam] decided to pin his hopes on what we have come to accept as the Savior of Humankind, namely ‘AI’, which can stand for a lot of things, but it’s definitely really smart and can even generate pretty pictures, which is something that the average human can not. Hence it’s time to let an LLM do all the smart plant caring stuff with ‘PlantMom’.

Since LLMs (so far) don’t come with physical appendages by default, some hardware had to be plugged together to measure parameters like light, temperature and soil moisture. Add to this a grow light & a water pump and all that remained was to tell the LMM using an extensive prompt (containing Python code) what it should do (keep the plant alive) and what responses (Python methods) are available. All that was left now was to let the ‘AI’ (Google’s Gemma 3) handle it.

To say that this resulted in a dramatic failure along with what reads like an emotional breakdown (on the side of the LLM) would be an understatement. The LLM insisted on turning the grow light on when it should be off and had the most erratic watering responses imaginable based on absolutely incorrect interpretations of the ADC data (flipping dry vs wet). After this episode the poor chili plant’s soil was absolutely saturated and is still trying to dry out, while the ongoing LLM experiment (with empty water tank) has the grow light blasting more often than a weed farm.

So far it seems like that the humble state machine’s job is still safe from being taken over by ‘AI’, and not even brown thumb folk can kill plants this efficiently.