My mom’s friend fell for one of those scams and paid something like $30 for some mystery seeds online because they were advertised on facebook as flowers shaped like cat faces. The website also claimed they were in the Bromeliad family, but the advertised flowers looked nothing like bromeliads. These scammers prey on people who take everything at face-value.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cats-eye-dazzle-flower-seeds/

Reminder there’s !houseplants@mander.xyz. I’m not affiliated with the mods there, but the comm is really good; I remember posting some orchid for id there and the folks there were quick to lead me to the right direction. If image models are ruining houseplant comms, that one is an exception :)

On-topic: this will get rougher with time. And it isn’t just plants; it’s everything. You could already generate fictional but realistic images of everything, but those models make it faster and easier, so of course some disingenuous people use it for scams since it doesn’t require any sort of skill any more. Eventually I think people will wise up, and learn to not trust images or videos, but while this doesn’t happen…

And the same deal applies to text content. Even if the content is human-made, you shouldn’t be relying on a single source of info, to begin with; now with text generators you’ll get even more babble, so the odds your “single source” is inaccurate raise sharply. For example if you need info on how to care about your pet potato plant you should be seeing a half dozen sites, cross-checking info, and seeing if some of them feel off.