Lately I’ve noticed while uploading a number of old photos through the web site, the suggestions are truly terrible and always the same seven or eight. Human and American Dog Tick come up a lot. This is through the web site upload. E.g. here’s a rather obvious Western Bluebird. The initial suggestio…

It could be related to this bug from 9 days ago, but your suggestions all list as “visually similar” whereas theirs were “seen nearby”. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/computer-vision-suggestions-behaving-strangely/14276 . I think we haven’t seen the last of this problem.

i don’t see any particular problems with computer vision suggestions right now either in the upload page or on the observation page. are you still consistently getting unusual suggestions? if so, try opening up the developer tools in your browser to see if any errors are popping up in the console.

Yey iNat - AI is getting sentient :) and trying to be funny. How wonderful would that be, seeing all this life on a daily basis the “quantum jump” was easier to make.

I haven’t seen any problems lately. @elharo is this still happening for you?

Yes, completely reproducible. Here’s today’s example with a crab: [crab bug] Mexican Free-tailed Bat seems to show up frequently as a suggestion. The others are mostly new, but none are close.

To answer an earlier question, the browser console doesn’t show any errors when I’m selecting a species. I was curious if there might be something off about my older photographs so I tried this Double-crested Cormorant from last year. Same weird suggestions. [cormorant]

This is interesting. Switching from Firefox to Chrome makes the recognition work: [goodcorm]

An incognito window in Firefox 78.0.2 does not fix it.

It seems to work on a different Mac, also with Firefox 78.0.2 and mostly the same extensions/preferences. I wonder if something could be screwy with my user session?

on the problematic machine, do you see similar problems on the computer vision suggestions outside of the upload page – for example, if you go to an observation detail page and click to begin an ID?

Excessively Generic, Really off Vision suggestions on website

Bug Reports

cthawley March 31, 2026, 11:27am 17

This bug may be an earlier manifestation of the Firefox CV bug, not sure:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/suggestions-not-working-in-firefox/63198

Topic		Replies	Views
Computer vision suggestions behaving strangely Bug Reports	7	510	July 11, 2020
Suggestions not working in firefox Bug Reports web	31	485	March 31, 2026
I've noticed some unusually innaccurate suggestions when uploading lately Bug Reports	15	595	August 5, 2024
Computer vision suggestions don't appear on web uploader Bug Reports web	10	549	April 19, 2020
More recently the CV with iNaturalist seems to be failing Bug Reports	11	1030	January 25, 2023

Excessively Generic, Really off Vision suggestions on website

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