There are thousands of varieties of hosta — a leafy decorative plant that you’ve probably seen adorning outdoor spaces — being cultivated around the world, in a luxurious spread of colors, sizes, and textures. The hardy and easy-to-care-for plants thrive in the shade and can grow enormous leaves, making them a perfect project for amateur gardeners.
Yet despite the glorious natural biodiversity that already exists in the species, scammers on TikTok are using AI-generated slop videos to sell dubious seeds for hosta varieties that don’t exist.
A quick search for “hosta seeds” reveals countless videos of unnaturally colored hostas, from a fictitious variety featuring enormous, purple leaves, to “God’s rainbow,” a made-up plant that grows garish, rainbow-colored foliage, described as “so magical, your neighbors will think it isn’t real,” according to a robotic-sounding AI voiceover.
“It’s called midnight blue heart,” a voiceover says in a separate video. “A rare black and blue hosta that looks like it came from another planet.”
“It’s magical, it’s hardy, and only a few dollars,” the voice continues. “Tap the link below to order and bring the midnight blue heart home.”
The obvious hallmarks of half-baked AI are impossible to ignore, from water streams from garden hoses that flow straight through the foliage or miss the plant entirely to seeds that magically float by themselves while held in a hand. Many of the videos even claim their miraculous hostas can thrive even in snowy conditions, which is a nonsense prospect: hostas may be perennial, but aren’t very frost-tolerant and sustain damage from freezing temperatures.
The bizarre trend is part of a much larger deluge of AI slop drowning out human-authored content across social media platforms.
Author Bree Bridges noticed her TikTok feed becoming overwhelmed by the videos.
“TikTok has started giving me AI-generated garden content with videos of people supposedly growing plants that quite clearly look like they came from the ‘Avatar’ planet,” Bridges wrote in a post on Bluesky.
“And also they’re watering them indoors sometimes while watering the carpet and they grow in three days,” she added.
Experts have already warned that hosta lovers should stay far away from seeds that purport to grow into fantastical plants. Ads that New York-based NBC-affiliate WHEC showed to Bill Hegeman, co-president of the Genesee Valley Hosta Society, immediately raised red flags.
“Definitely all fake,” he said.
“Stop!” the TikTok account behind the outdoor living store Touch of Eco exclaimed in a recent clip. “If you see these colorful hosta seeds on TikTok, never buy them. These are fake, AI-generated.”
Even before the advent of generative AI, fake seeds were already a widespread scam on the internet. As YouTuber Atomic Shrimp explored in a video last year, seeds for made-up flowers like “cat face flowers” that inexplicably feature the faces of felines are being sold for considerable amounts of money.
On eBay, for instance, 50 seeds for a “cute cat face orchid” are being sold for $6.68. Poorly photoshopped or possibly AI-generated images show the faces of cats perched in the middle of fantastical plants.
During his investigation, Atomic Shrimp noticed that dodgy seed vendors were all using similar “cookie-cutter sites,” which are “probably very easy, cheap, and quick to deploy from a template.” The sites are also likely “acting as a front end for seedy, pun intended, drop shipping operations where the fulfilment, assuming there is such, is coming from the same sellers that list the same dodgy scam seeds for sale on Wish, AliExpress, Amazon, eBay, and other marketplaces.”
But instead of selling preposterously photoshopped seeds for “rainbow tomatoes,” scammers are using new tactics in a new age defined by AI slop.
One account on TikTok is even recycling the concept of a “cute cat orchid” by animating the images and turning them into a whole video.
Another video shows an adult cat’s face literally blinking its eyes as its disembodied head is reincarnated in the shape of a demonic orchid.
“How have 107 people bought this?” one TikTok account wrote in the comments.
“I can’t believe people actually fell for this,” another added.
More on AI slop: AI “Research” Papers Are Complete Slop, Experts Say
The post TikTok Accounts Are Using AI Slop to Sell Seeds to Plants That Don’t Exist appeared first on Futurism.
