As I try to upload observations this morning, I’m finding that the AI identification tool seems to be stuck? blocked? clogged? As I try to get AI to help fill in the IDs of common species like the beautiful wood nymph (Eudryas grata) shown in the photo, AI suddenly reports that it doesn’t know what it is and suggests big brown bat. I get exactly the same suggestions for every photo that I uploaded. Normally, AI knows all the common moths that I upload.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Firefox 133.0.3
I know this behavior from firefox. For me change to chrome or a complete restart of firefox helps. Up to now firefox failed for me exactly like this after taking a nap in the computer sleep mode. But this may be only a random coincidence.
probably you have enabled a feature in your browser that attempts to prevent HTML Canvas Fingerprinting, which has the side effect of preventing the iNat website from using a Canvas element to properly resize images to be evaluated by the iNat Computer Vision. you need to disable the feature – at least for the iNat website – to get the CV suggestions working again.
Aha! It does seem to be a Firefox problem. When I had the same session open in Firefox, I continually got no help from the AI identifier. I uploaded the same set of photos in Chrome, and AI worked fine. I restarted Firefox, and then Firefox worked fine again with the same set of photos. Something in the Firefox cache perhaps, something that got cleared when I stopped and restarted Firefox?
In any case, the glitch seems to be with Firefox, not with the AI system.
Much as I don’t like to harp on it, I must regularly restart Firefox. Most of the time I can ascribe this to a Firefox upgrade which happened in the background. They’re very proactive about maintaining it, which appears to affect libraries before the main programme has been restarted.
I don’t trust Chrome and it’s kin.
I just tested this as I’ve been having the same problem. Surprisingly, it does seem to reproduce the problem. I first uploaded a photo to the CV Demo to check it was working, then immediately switched to sleep mode and back again. After that, every upload fails with “We’re not confident enough to make a recommendation” and shows the same suggestions. (For me, it’s always glow-worms, bats, frogs, owls and fungi). This seems to prove it’s not a caching issue. Exactly the same behaviour occurs when using the upload page on the main website.
I tried disabling hardware acceleration and fingerprint prevention, but neither has any effect. Restarting Firefox is the only thing that fixes it.
PS: this is using Firefox-133.0 on Linux with an NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 gpu. This is a somewhat old card now, so I’d be interested to know if anyone with a newer NVIDIA gpu can also reproduce the problem.
None at all. I don’t think it’s that kind of problem. There’s quite a few reports online of issues with Firefox when waking from sleep mode. Another very common one (which I also get) is temporary corrupted rendering of the window - but that’s easy to fix by activating another window. The problem may be caused by the way the NVIDIA driver saves and restores video memory during suspend/hibernate operations (see NVIDIA: Power Management Support). I think there’s some kernel settings I could try tweaking which might improve matters (e.g NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations). I will investigate further tomorrow.
