A leafy ornamental plant that you've probably seen gracing your outdoor space, hostas are grown in thousands of varieties around the world, offering a luxurious range of colors, sizes, and textures. Hardy and easy to care for, this plant grows in shade and can grow giant leaves, making it the perfect project for amateur gardeners.
But despite the impressive natural biodiversity already present in hosta species, scammers on TikTok are using vulgar AI-generated videos to sell dubious seeds of non-existent varieties.
A simple search for “hosta seeds” brings up countless videos of unnaturally colored hostas, from a fictional variety with giant purple leaves to “God's Rainbow,” a fictional plant with garish rainbow-colored leaves that a robotic-sounding AI narration describes as “so magical your neighbors will think it's not real.”
“It's called Midnight Blue Heart,” a voiceover says in another video. “A rare black and blue hosta that looks like it came from another planet.”
“It's magical, durable, and only a few dollars,” the voice continues. “Tap the link below to place your order and take home your Midnight Blue Heart.”
The obvious characteristics of half-baked AI cannot be ignored. From the stream of water from your garden hose running straight through the leaves or missing your plants entirely, to seeds that magically float on their own when you hold them in your hand. Many of the videos even claim that the miracle hosta can grow in snowy conditions, but this is a nonsensical prospect. Although hostas are perennials, they are not very cold hardy and can be damaged by sub-zero temperatures.
This strange trend is part of a much larger flood of AI drowning out human-generated content across social media platforms.
Author Bree Bridges noticed that her TikTok feed was overwhelmed with videos.
“TikTok started serving me AI-generated garden content, including videos of people apparently growing plants that apparently came from the planet of Avatar,” Bridges wrote in a post on Bluesky.
“I also water the carpets and sometimes indoors, and they grow in three days,” she added.
Experts are already warning hosta enthusiasts to stay away from seeds that claim to grow into fantasy plants. New York based advertising NBC-Affiliate WHEC When I showed it to Bill Hegeman, co-president of the Genesee Valley Hosta Association, red flags were immediately raised.
“It's definitely all fake,” he said.
“Stop!” the outdoor living store Touch of Eco's TikTok account exclaimed in a recent clip. “If you see these colorful hosta seeds on TikTok, don't buy them. These are AI-generated fakes.”
Even before the advent of generative AI, fake seeds were already a widespread scam on the internet. As YouTuber Atomic Shrimp investigated in a video last year, engineered flower seeds such as the “cat face flower,” which inexplicably features the face of a feline, are selling for considerable sums of money.
For example, 50 “cute cat face orchid” seeds are selling for $6.68 on eBay. The poorly Photoshopped, or perhaps AI-generated, image shows a cat's face perched in the middle of a fantastical plant.
During the investigation, Atomic Shrimp realized how dangerous it was. Seed vendors all use similar “cookie cutter sites” that are “probably very easy, cheap, and quick to deploy from a template.” These sites may also be “acting as front ends for shady, pun intended, dropshipping operations, with fulfillment provided by the same sellers that list the same dangerous scams sold on Wish, AliExpress, Amazon, eBay, and other marketplaces, assuming such exists.”
But instead of selling ridiculous photoshopped “rainbow tomato” seeds, scammers are using new tactics for a new age defined by AI slop.
One account on TikTok is repurposing the “cute cat orchid” concept by animating the image into an entire video.
Another video shows an adult cat's face literally blinking as its disembodied head takes on the shape of a demonic orchid.
“How did 107 people buy this?” one TikTok account wrote in the comments.
“I can't believe people would actually fall for this,” added another.
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