Scientists developed an artificial intelligence system that can automatically identify eight different types of puffball mushrooms from photographs with 95% accuracy. The study compared five different AI models and found that a modern convolutional neural network called ConvNeXt-Base was the best at telling apart puffball species that look very similar to each other. This technology could help amateur mushroom enthusiasts, researchers, and nature conservationists accurately identify these fungi without needing a microscope or laboratory tests.