https://www.inaturalist.org/people/zdanko
Read the profile?
Try The Fly Guide.
Or not.
Are you an expert - if so in what ?
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Well everyone loves to be the first, I get to be the first one you meet.
Hello, I’m a guy who has no degree at all, and have a bit of a reputation of being a Bombus expert. Everything I learned was by “easy internet means”, and learning by doing. I gained access to papers behind pay walls by meeting experts who I could ask for those papers. I have hundred of ID’s in several collections, and I even wrote a critique in my journal that sprouted legs to the point that the big guy in my field (who I was more or less critiquing) decided to track me down twice to discuss the situation with me. I have advised on multiple species that state governments were considering for threatened status, and been consulted for my opinion on a few papers.
Not to blow my own horn (even though I am a braggart), but I have very much benefited from these “easy online means”, and many other have as well.
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Easy. Who do other experts tag in? In the bee world, John Ascher was our first major expert. Some of us learned by watching him. It got to the point where he now tags us in on difficult ID’s. Others came along and learned by watching us. I know who those are, and now we all routinely ask those newer people.
Do you want to know who the experts are? ask around. The real credentialed experts might know uncredentialed experts.
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Conversely, I know of several credentialed experts that suck at this. You have a degree, that doesn’t make you an expert at everything in this field.
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Not disagreeing, but that sounds very circular. You seem to be defining experts by those who tag other experts, who tag you back. I’m sure there’s actually more to it than that, but I don’t think it’s quite as ‘easy’ as you’re claiming. (If nothing else, it must take looking at a lot of IDs to get a feel for who’s IDing and tagging/being tagged.)
Let’s be honest - it doesn’t necessarily make you an expert at anything. Case in point? Me… :-)
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Circular yes. But does it not work? You see a professor ask someone else’s opinion and you aren’t going to assume that person may have some expertise in the question at hand?
I’m very active on iNat but don’t do anything with bees (no need to be stingy :D)
Thanks for the example - this illustrates my point. An expert… as evidenced through validation by a scientific institution, scientific peers, and science publishers/editors/reviewers - not simply the mere claims by a (large) group of internet users on some website. The point of reference for such an expertise is still roughly the same as before the advent of the internet. And the expert can in turn use their expertise to assess (even if roughly) the expertise of others, or the outcome of a LLM, or some text on a blog, or whatever.
edit: This discussion is not about whether academic/human credentials make the expertise (although it certainly may help with/be a strong indicator thereof) - but rather, whether a “bunch of new tools” improve or decrease the value/role of expertise (~ truths telling and crud sieving). We’re in an era of ‘post-truth crisis’ and ‘alternative facts’ and ‘do your own research’; I observe that -unfortunately- the new “easyfication” tools also strengthen feelings against expertise.
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And with the internet, I and many others learned a lot from him, to the point that we now get asked our opinion by credentialed experts, not just on ID’s, but on other aspects of the field.
I don’t know that we can say we’re in a “post-truth crisis”, since I don’t know that we’ve previously been in a “truth era”. Consider the misinformation on history that is in recent years coming to light, much of which was sold to us before because the misinformation was more convenient at the time.
While now giving unfettered access to legions of humans has certainly caused an explosion of false information. We are still better able today to counter than we were before. There are inaccuracies that have stood in unchallenged bedrock for decades that are now common knowledge inaccuracies and we all laugh at them.
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Well, what do the experts say?
edit: I’ll leave it here, too much personal heat for me - folks interested in academic materials on post-truth, misinformation, correction and its shortcomings… can dig into e.g. the expert works of S. Lewandowsky and colleagues (most should be open-access now).
I have closed the thread temporarily in order to give myself some time to bring this thread to order.
*
before I re-open in slow mode, some reminders.
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This applies even in cases where the other person IS breaking the rules of conduct. The appropriate action to take in these cases is to flag the post, or send a message to a moderator. Likewise, on the main website, use the flag system to report issues, and for extreme cases you should contact help@inaturalist.org .
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You can open a new topic, or request that a moderator split the side discussion into a new topic for you.
- Stay civil. If you find yourself becoming irritated, you can step away. The forum will still be here in an hour, or tomorrow. We can express ourselves best with a clear head.
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Do we trust scientists?
Yes https://theconversation.com/most-of-us-trust-scientists-shows-a-survey-of-nearly-72-000-people-worldwide-246252
And the published research
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I think societal trust in academia is a different subject than the proliferation of AI content and discussion of that should maybe be moved to a different thread (if it’s considered appropriate for the forum). I think it’s accurate to say that public trust in academia and other authoritative institutions is declining relative to the experience of recent generations, while it’s also true that rumours and conspiracy theories have been a normal part of conversation throughout history.
But to bring it back to the subject of the OP, it does seem likely to me that increasing accessibility of AI will exacerbate issues with lack of trust in anything. As discussed above it’s already difficult to assess whether websites are legitimate, and I expect it won’t be too long until that level of suspicion is appropriate for any photo, video, or “person” you encounter on the internet.
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This article seems to be a good match to the topic here, a sometimes funny, sometimes worrisome read:
https://tradescantia.uk/article/dont-ask-an-ai-for-plant-advice/
What I got away from it is: There’s a need to educate folks on safe prompt design for AI so you’re not getting nonsensical or dangerously wrong replies. And I think increased care and curation need to be used when feeding info to these AI models for training. Just letting them pull from the internet will probably result in a machine-learning feedback loop similar to profile drift when training the CV with misidentified images. The more fake stuff gets posted online and is feeding into AI search or ID models, the more they will drift. Going forward, it will take more knowledge, research and time to sort through all that to figure out reality.
I’ve also found several nursery websites that have added a page now about the phenomenon of AI-generated plant pictures, trying to point out how to spot the fakes. You can almost hear the exasperation between the lines of having to explain to their customers that these plant do not exist and therefore they do not have them available for sale. This also affects online image searches, and especially for people generally not very familiar with plants this will make it even harder to sort out truthful information and pictures of them. For computer-generated imagery of humans, we tend to instinctively pick up that something is “off” about the picture (though deepfakes are getting better and better, too). This uncanny valley detection does not seem to exist for plant imagery - unless you really know those plants, which is not the case for most people out there.
Maybe at some point in the future we’ll reach a critical point where people will go back to primarily utilizing human-curated directories and word-of-mouth instead of search engines and algorithms to find reliable information because search engine results consist entirely of AI-generated clickbait nonsense competing for the top SEO rankings. For the botanical nonsense accumulating online, I’m hoping better education about plants and how to spot the AI stuff might help. I also think in the long term iNaturalist with its community-based identification system could prove to be much more robust and reliable than other more AI-driven identification apps out there.
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Okay, maybe it’s just because I’m suddenly sick, but I could not stop giggling. I know that this was intended for serious discussion, but I still appreciate the levity today. 
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Your concerns are not overblown.
There is a lady on Instagram Black Forager and she posts a lot of content on foraging plants and making yummy things with them. She posted about AI generated books being sold on Amazon, one book in particular was about mushrooms. Identifying mushrooms and information on whether they are edible or not. The entire book was AI generated, had dangerously false information, the author is non-existent (AI generated image of a man, with a fake name) and there is no way for a lay person to now this book was AI generated. Someone could literally die from following advice from that book and no one would be liable since it was AI generated.
Your concerns are most certainly valid.
AI needs to be regulated. Period.
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Someone had to have told the AI to generate it.
Right but how do you verify that if you don’t know that it was AI generated? It seems completely legit. There is a picture of a person and name. There have been many times when companies disappear without a trace and you are left with a fake product on your hands.
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Related case:
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