i feel like most of what is called ‘AI’ isn’t AI at all.
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Just a day ago a family friend sent me a picture of a potted plant wanting to know what it was so she could go buy it. It was an AI image she pulled off Facebook. I was very confused, couldn’t tell what was off about it – but I knew instantly something about the picture looked wrong/fake.
It does make me surprised I haven’t ever seen an AI image uploaded by some other user wanting to know what something is. People upload pics they didn’t personally take all the time - especially when they know the original photographer doesn’t have an iNat. I’m not sure how iNat will control this moving forward, but I can tell you the computer vision did not ask me “is this a real plant?” when I tested it out (observation never submitted).
I have seen AI photos on social media. My family sometimes shows me these pictures, and all the comments are like, “Wow! What a beautiful [insert taxon]!”. I find these infuriating, as nature is a hundred more beautiful than these things, and people get an impression that nature is only found in oddly unsettling pockets of rare forest.
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Yup. As far as I can tell, the only actual real major advancement we have had in AI is that somehow everyone has been convinced that all of this (picture me gesturing wildly at everything) is artificial intelligence.
Just a couple of years ago, if you asked people what “AI” meant, they would have described something much more…intelligent. The term used to refer to something which would (we imagined) be new and different, a real leap forward, an actual game changer.
What we actually have right now is just some incremental advances on existing technology, some of which has some impressively flashy niche uses. (For example, generating a photo of something you describe in text is just not that useful in the real world. There is clipart. There are stock photos. We used to have search engines to find these things.) “Real” AI is still science fiction. The only thing about the game that has changed is what we call it.
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Or, as a wise person once said, “I don’t want AI to do my writing and art for me so that I can do my dishes and laundry. I want AI to do my dishes and laundry for me so that I can do writing and art.”
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Another good line I have heard is “why should anyone want to read something that no one wanted to write?”
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You could also consider the possibility that AI is a tool used by someone to convince people of something.
CV ( computer vision ) can on its own be used just to refer to image analysis without any broader use of machine learning. So, I find use of the term CV on its own as misleading in regard to the iNat autosuggest, even if some people do use CV in this broad-brushstroke manner outside of iNat as well.
iNat autosuggest would not exist without both machine learning and computer vision.
Machine learning is a core subset of AI. So it is not technically incorrect to refer to iNaturalist as an application of AI.
But computer vision can also be considered to be a subset of artificial intelligence…
All the Venn diagrams represent this a little differently, but iNat is somewhere here :
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Last winter, I listened to a very interesting and provocative podcast from Vox’s “Unexplainable” podcast series.The host interviewed two scientists. It was about the use of AI to communicate with wildlife and some of the real unintended consequences.
I couldn’t find a way to link to the actual podcast but if you go to the website https://www.vox.com/unexplainable, it’s the episode titled “Can We Talk to Animals?”. And here is a link to the transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12ag5zdoi2IlBrJ8POneDzkvVZ1y4Wz00cLC9qq8-C4g/edit?usp=sharing
The part about the ramifications and unintended consequences of AI learning “animal language” starts about halfway through. Here’s a couple of excerpts:
“If we just create a whale that starts to sing, especially before we understand what it’s what it means, we could be messing up a wisdom tradition, right? Creating a kind of whale QAnon. We don’t know. And that means before that happens, because that means like, it’s a very crazy thing to think. I didn’t think we’re going to get here this quickly… in the next 12 months, 5 years, certainly before 2030, we will have the capacity to do real time, two way communication animal to AI—not necessarily animal to human—and we need to have a kind of Geneva Convention for cross-species communication, a prime directive …”
“…This will enable the acceleration of the kind of cat and mouse game between poachers and gamekeepers. No doubt there also is the specter of being able to domesticate species that were formerly not domesticatable all by humans. So we may be able to use this in certain contexts—and this is what my next book is about—for biodiversity conservation goals. At the same time, it could allow bad actor—and keep in mind how, how big the multibillion dollar global illegal wildlife trade is right—to further capitalize on their ability to ensnare animals that have so far been, you know, sort of out of reach.”
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What fresh horror is this?
Diana,
I know,right? As I said, I heard this last winter and now I can’t get it out of my head. I wonder (hope) though, that there will be some form of AI that will help humans better foresee the wider consequences of their creations. AI tattling on AI?
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