I often (for me) look to see what has been observed in the way of arthropods, particularly arachnids. While I’m looking at observations I’ll try to ID or correct if it’s a good-enough photo. Sometimes I view the submitter’s profile to judge what kind of experience they have. It often seems like the person just used the iNat suggestion, but when I submit my own I try to at least make a preliminary ID at some level, and I don’t use my phone so I don’t have much experience with those suggestions (and if I get one, I check it out first).
As I try to offer an ID of some sort, it would be nice to know if that’s the case, that someone not very knowledgeable just used a suggestion, i.e. where the first ID originated, as I come across a good number that are questionable or just wrong, based on my own experience with those particular critters.
If you’re IDing on the website, you can see the little magical/shiny icon that indicates that this ID came from the computer vision. It also shows up if you open up observations on the Identify tool page.
I will add that I’ll often use the computer vision suggestions even when I DO know the ID, just because it’s often faster than typing in the name! I suspect others probably do the same.
Before accepting the first suggestion of an organism I’m unsure of, I will use the Explore tab to see if it is found in the same area and then I will look at as many of the other observations to see how well it matches.
It can work for some groups and completely fails for others, especially in regions where far from even majority species recorded already, many taxa are not even on iNat taxonomy yet, so be careful and do the search outside of iNat if you wanna go with a suggestion!
I notice the same thing with some moths. It’s not a big problem though. I use the suggestions as mentioned above, plus I will use it to see if it can give me some clues for an observation I don’t know and I’m trying to identify. Often helps narrow things down.
