Asklemmy

studying with ChatGPT be like

I think it's saying that you can eat the fruit fly, but not food the fruit fly has touched.

It's always worth remembering, though, that bacteria live on some foods more easily than others. I'd be surprised if most bacteria could live long in wine.

Just wash your flies before consumption.

It's the trouble with researching and reading around questions like these because you'll get a lot answers like this one that seem more sensible than others and even provide some pretty plausible sounding reasoning behind their conclusions but then proceed to either directly contradict themselves, or simply leave an obvious implicit contradiction unaddressed.

The issue I think is, if we take what's said as true (no telling if it is, but again, sounds pretty reasonabland plausible) it can't tell you much about the real likelihood that it will actually cause you real problems in real life. It seems entirely reasonable to believe that fruit flies may carry bacteria on the surface of their bodies and that that bacteria could be harmful and so reasonable for the author to include and thus not be giving dangerous advice just saying everything is safe don't worry about it. But it's also kind of useless what are the odds the particular bacteria is going to be harmful vs something your body can easily dispatch? How much bacteria would you need to ingest for it to be dangerous? Is there enough of it on one fruitfly to be problematic? If so, what about the surfaces of different foods? What about liquids? Including wine? What are the relative odds of all of these factors aligning just right to make you sick?

If you replace fruitfly in that text with just fly, I expect that would likely also be true. If you asked people can you eat cake that's had a fly on it you'll get a gamut of responses from people saying of course it's fine they do it all the time to people saying it'll definitely make you sick to a more nuanced response like this one, but I bring up the case of flies in particular because the fact is the odds are very good that you eat food a fly has been on all the time because they land on it and then fly away without any noticing. Sometimes people eat the food and get sick and the mechanism for how that happened might be exactly as described, but then again most of the time you eat a slice of cake from a display case and you're fine despite it likely having had many visitors on its surface during its time there.

Despite its seemingly contradictory way in which it's written, I think this is probably consistent, it provides a mechanism how a fruit fly could make you sick then goes on to say there's no evidence that fruit flies do make you sick, which is not surprising because attributing a case where someone got sick from ingesting bacteria to a fruit fly is going to be pretty difficult when there's so many mechanisms by which that could happen to you.

Frankly without providing some additional context to nail down how likely the proposed mechanism is to actually cause disease and in what specific circumstances that type of information is truthful yet misleading. Honestly, I'd drink it, but I can't honestly say I have any solid evidence that's definitely safe, only that it just seems so unlikely that it could represent a serious threat, whilst being capable of happening so easily yet not seeming to represent a major public health concern. It seems like if it really was that dangerous, human cohabitation in areas with any appreciable fruit fly population would be untenable.