ROCHESTER, N.Y. — If you’re holiday shopping for the green thumb in your life, you might be considering some seeds for their garden. On several online sites, you’ll find hosta seeds for sale but these aren’t your garden variety hostas. They come in wild, exotic colors. So, are they real or are these sellers sowing deceit? We get to the root of it in today’s Fact Check.
The colors are stunning. Hosta plants grown from seeds in colors ranging from red to purple to blue are available on many websites including Amazon and Walmart. On TikTok, there’s an ad for a hosta in deep black and cosmic blue tones.
“Plant it by your front door in December and your home instantly becomes the Christmas show stopper of the entire street,” the ad says.
So why haven’t you seen any of these colorful hostas in your neighborhood? Are they real? We went to someone who knows all about hostas.
“We’re all, like I call, hostaholics,” said Bill Hegeman, co-president of the Genesee Valley Hosta Society.
Hegeman and his wife have more than 500 different varieties of hostas in their yard.
“Hosta is a perennial. It’s a shade tolerant perennial,” Hegeman said.
He’s seen these ads and his assessment is, “Definitely all fake.”
Hegeman says there are variations on the colors of hostas but nothing that even closely resembles these. And the seeds? Two different ads for the exact same hosta show different seeds. Besides, Hegeman says variegated or multicolored hostas don’t come true from seeds.
Brett Davidsen, News10NBC: “What do you think would happen if somebody bought these seeds and put them in the ground?”
Bill Hegeman: “Heaven only knows. Maybe you’re going to have a weed garden.”
So, is this the work of AI?
“Whenever AI is used to manipulate or generate, influence a piece of content, there will be trace evidence of that process left behind,” said Christopher Schwartz, an RIT research scientist who works in the Deepfake Detection Project.
We showed Schwartz the hosta videos and photographs. He says they’re definitely AI generated.
“First and foremost, there’s just a lot of unnaturalness in the physics of the video,” Schwartz said.
Using the eye test and machine perception, Schwartz found several things that didn’t seem natural like oddly shaped hands and leaves.
“There’s this one moment in the TikTok video where they’re watering the plant — there’s something weird about the water,” Schwartz said.
So, while you might like to believe you can grow a hosta that looks like these, forget it. Save your money and get your hostas from a nursery because claims that you can grow these vivid varieties are FALSE.
We did reach out to the TikTok account, Amazon and others who are listing the fake hosta seeds. We’re still waiting to hear from them. In the meantime, there are other varieties of flowering plants for sale that also appear to be fake. If you’re not sure, contact your local nursery.
The post Fact Check: Exotic hosta seeds online? Experts say they’re fake appeared first on WHEC.com.
