I understand this thread that the problem is less of “observations getting stuck at ‘unknown’”, and more of “observations getting stuck at higher taxonomy levels”. I also sympathise with the concern regarding how an AI feature’s ID would be accounted for in the Community ID, as well as perceived by human users.
To address these concerns, I’m proposing the following:
- When sufficiently confident, the feature should apply a “proxy ID” to observations that are stuck (“stuck” defined by x amount of time inactivity) to observations with high taxonomy IDs.
- This “proxy ID” should not be shown anywhere on the UI and should not be considered as part of the Community ID.
- This “proxy ID” should only trigger the observation to show up in https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify when the relevant filters are applied. For example, given an observation that’s stuck at the ‘plants’ level, if the feature is confident that the observation is a ‘dicot’, the observation should show up if the user is filtering for dicots.
The expected impact of this feature could be that more “stuck” observations would be confidently pushed to lower taxonomic levels where (I assume) more identifier users are available.
One draw back: in some false positive edge cases, users could be confused by “why a certain observation ended up in their filtered list”. To mitigate this:
- there could be an indication of the feature at action on the ID interface
- users could opt out of this feature, using the filter UI.