I am something of a newbie with considerable knowledge of microbe identities. I now routinely review new entries for what iNaturalist calls ‘Protozoans’. There is a recurring problem which I suspect may arise from poorly informed artificial intelligence. Micrographs that do not show diagnostic fe…

That happens with all complicated groups, if AI suggests wrong taxa it usually mean there’re too few records for the right id, too many photos of the taxa that is suggested or a poor quality photo. AI is also trained by those misidentifications too. With protozoans the website needs tons of high qua…

This little symbol appears on IDs that came from computer vision suggestions. [07%20PM]

Just to add to the previous responses, the training data isn’t something that can be manually corrected. It is generated automatically using data that meets a certain threshhold. The only real way to improve the service is to correct any Research Grade observations that are wrong, and apart from t…

Before the last update to the computer vision, the AI would often suggest mosses and other completely wrong things for all my microscope photos regardless of what it was. It’s still pretty lousy now, but for some things like diatoms it can actually be useful and it at least tends to suggest other mi…

I would SOO love to see an article on the AI procedure and how it works in iNaturalist, including how observers and identifiers can cooperate to make it better. Every time I submit something I wonder about this. @mtank ’s comment seems to imply that the AI only uses RG observations in training, and t…

There’s already a lot that has been said about computer vision: https://forum.inaturalist.org/search?q=computer%20vision Also in the help pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#computer-vision To summarize what is relevant to the problem: A taxon needs to have at least 100 obs in order t…

Thanks, @exonie . I will check those sources. You are right that I sometimes comment on what I think something might be rather than enter an ID, if I have some notion but not a clear opinion. I find that often stimulates a conversation that everybody learns something from, and then I revise the ID…

Wow, I was unaware of this symbol for IDs that come from the CV. I have to say, I have mixed feelings. I can see it being useful info in some situations. However, I (and I expect many others) regularly select an option from the CV suggestions just because it feels faster than typing it in. For e…

[image] shelley_b: I typically know right away which member of the tribe I’m seeing, so I’m not relying on the CV’s expertise at all, despite selecting my ID from its drop-down menu. Same for me with my plant IDs (well, most of them… :wink:) What I have done in these cases (via the web site)…

I was unaware of the symbol too. I routinely call up the CV even when I know the ID because somewhere I read that helps the CV to train. That is, I thought I was teaching IT something. Oh well.

Artificial intelligence and misidentifications

General

bouteloua December 5, 2019, 2:23am 19

See the discussion on this related feature request:

Topic		Replies	Views
Can the Computer Vision be stopped from this mis-ID? General	29	1315	December 25, 2021
Don't use computer vision General	169	9776	September 18, 2020
"Helping" the computer vision - is this wrong? General	37	2680	September 10, 2020
Problems with Computer Vision and new/inexperienced users General	134	5547	December 27, 2021
False "research grade" observations General	37	4288	November 1, 2020

Artificial intelligence and misidentifications

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