I don’t really have a personal opinion on this yet, but I was curious what other people think about this subject.
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What do you mean by this?
I’m just wondering what kind of impact it has on nature. Things that it can do like identifying plants and animals and what kind of dangers or potential problems could occur.
I still have no idea what you’re asking. In that way, AI has no impact on nature whatsoever?
Are you asking about the environmental impact of the technology that AI runs on? Are you talking about how AI has changed the way that people interact with nature? Or some other third thing?
I think I mean the way AI has changed the way that people interact with nature.
In that case, this isn’t about AI’s impact on nature at all, but about how AI has changed human culture.
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I think many people have long forgotten that they are also a part of nature. We have been travelling further away from being hunters and gatherers and thus connected to the land. If AI can help get people out and reconnect to the other life on this earth and educate them by way of identifying and informing, then that is a great thing in my eyes.
Pro: creating awareness
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With CV on INaturalist as AI technology, there are definitely a huge flaw in suggesting the wrong species which I was quite a victim of. The problem worsens with Seek since you can’t really change the species on the Seek’s observations in which go into the challenges.
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A corresponding con is creating misinformation. AI-generated “nature photographs” can create a wrong impression about nature and, even worse, potentially create the impression that nature is thriving better than it really is.
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Well at least iNat’s CV won’t be taking the world over in a massive AI apocalypse anytime soon.
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If AI can just take care of all my household chores so i can get out the house and into the garden/ nature then that will be fantastic 
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Being at present AI stupid and biased depending on how its creator has created it, the impact will be detrimental if used in managing nature.
Human: How can we slow deforestation?
AI: You can try gluing the trees back in place.
Just a joke; not an actual conversation.
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By far AI’s biggest impact on nature thus far is the enormous carbon footprint of all the extra computing power that goes into it. Most of this is not relatively efficient operations like iNat, but power hungry and overly broad applications. Every big company seems to think they need to jump on ChatGPT’s bandwagon, and they are using absurd amounts of electricity to do it. See here for more context and details: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ais-climate-impact-goes-beyond-its-emissions/
This article is almost a year old, so just keep in mind how much bigger AI’s electrical use has gotten since then.
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in terms of AI telling us what to do, we already know what to do. Unless AI can somehow convince the global elite of things scientists, naturalists, and indigenous people can not, it won’t help in that regard. We solve climate change by not emitting more fossil fuels and restoring wetlands and forest and other ecosystems that sequester carbon. We solve ecosystem collapse by not removing intact ecosystems, restoring impacted ones, and not spraying chemicals that kill all the insects, dumping mass amounts nutrients in waterways, overfishing, etc.
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We need more peat bogs!
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So true!
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It’s probably way less than crypto and NFTs though…
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yeah i personally don’t find the impact of using AI in terms of carbon sequestration to be that compelling of an argument compared with all of the other things going on in the world. I’m not a major AI user by any means but using it to help identify a species or write a report or something seems a much smaller impact than so many other things. I guess everything matters, and we should put the AI data centers in Iceland on recent volcanic areas where there’s abundant geothermal energy and an excess of water everywhere.
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Technically, the iNat CV is not AI. They are very different digital “things”. Fundamentally different. i know people use these terms interchangeably but they are not really interchangeable. You can read up on AI and definitions, etc, on the glorious internet.
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