Exploring New Ways to Learn from iNaturalist’s Community Expertise

I’m happy to see this released so we’re aware of the status of the project and a preliminary idea of what it looks like. I like the general format including the inclusion of source comments and multiple sections for different aspects of the species. A couple questions: How are those sections selected? And are comments within IDs included or just isolated comments?

It’s clearly stated that this is an early mockup with limited training data, so I feel like some people are overreacting about some of the obvious concerns like redundancy, missing important context (e.g. range, life stage), and advanced vocabulary. Many of these were brought up in the initial thread (along with general AI concerns, suggestions of a wiki instead, etc. etc.) in speculation about what the demo might look like, and seeing them in early stages of this experiment seems expected; I wouldn’t expect them to be all fixed at this point. Presumably what happens with the results of the experiment will depend on how successfully these can be addressed with improved prompting or whatever goes on behind the scenes of something like this. Maybe it will stay like the Vision Language Demo and never leave the stage of being an interesting experimental demo page. Or some parts will be used and other parts won’t.

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