I think what they’re getting at is that a lot of people on those Facebook ID groups misuse iNat and provide bad IDs. As someone who’s been active on Facebook ID groups before, the sequence of events is often:
-Person posts photo asking for ID
-Person who doesn’t have any idea what the correct ID is uploads it into the iNat app and looks at the top suggested species, usually without enterring any location data
-CV spits out a best attempt at an ID which the person then parrots on the Facebook group
-Actual identifiers have to come in and correct the misinformation
It’s not just iNat either… my wife is working on a PhD in ornithology and knows her birds really well, and she’s had experiences on bird ID groups where she’ll say “that’s a warbler” and then 5 other people will chime in with “I asked ChatGPT and it says it’s a sparrow!!” or “iNat says it’s a reed bunting!!” By “iNat”, of course, they mean the top CV suggestion of the uncropped photo with no location data given, not the community of iNat identifiers.
As a result, many Facebook groups have banned members from taking someone else’s picture, asking an AI/CV what it is, and then just repeating that ID in the group. Just like on iNat, your ID suggestions are supposed to be your suggestions based on your knowledge. If the person asking the question wanted an AI’s opinion, they wouldn’t be posting on a community forum of human experts.
So despite iNat being a great resource, I suspect the FB mods have just become fed up with wrong IDs from outside sources, and decided to implement a zero tolerance policy for any “machine-assisted” IDs. I might not agree with it, but having modded some FB groups in the past, I can see how after deleting the 100th “My AI says this moth is a spruce tree” comment of the day, someone might become jaded toward the whole CV-ID process.
I think the more thoughtful process that @earthknight suggests is perfectly reasonable, but I also see how a Facebook mod could just be worn out and exhausted by the awful IDs coming from people who don’t know how to use the CV, and could have a gut negative response to seeing anything about iNat suggestions. Again, having been a mod on one of those groups before, the number of ridiculous ID suggestions that we would clean up and delete before the general usership even saw them is higher than one might expect.
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