Correlation, but not perfect. Largely because most of the Union stayed, so you get states like North Dakota that was part of a Union territory but a red state. That and Appalachia (e.g. West Virginia, Ohio) swung pretty hard from the union cause to the confederates thanks to coal baron propaganda and the erosion of union power in the post Regan era. The confederate states are almost all red though, with the only current exception being Virginia and varying degrees of hope for near future conversions in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas

Per the Jewish Insider citing a anonymous source, so take that for what you will

Are you assuming that AI in this case is some form of generative AI? I would not ask chatgpt if a mushroom is poisonous. But I would consider using a convolutional neural net based plant identification software. At that point you are depending on the quality of the training data set for the CNN and the rigor put into validating the trained model, which is at least somewhat comparable to depending on a plant identification book to be sufficiently accurate/thorough, vs depending on the accuracy of a story that genAI makes up based on reddit threads, which is a much less advisable venture