Platform(s): Web, mobile apps
Description of need:
It’s been brought up in various parts of the iNaturalist community that images which are not photographs specifically or primarily featuring the actual organism being observed may be having a negative impact on the CV training. This is a particularly acute concern for taxa with fewer observations or extremely similar lookalikes, where the margin for error or mis-training is narrower.
There’s contention in the community about whether these types of media should even be uploaded at all, even if they can help in the identification process, because of the damage they may do to the CV; and likewise, there is contention about whether identifiers should skip over observations that contain these sorts of images, because of the potential harm to the CV that could be caused by identifying observations whose images might salt the CV.
This concern encompasses images such as, but not limited to:
- Spectrograms of recorded audio
- Habitat shots
- DNA test results
- Chemical test results
- Drawings & hand illustrations
- AI art
Feature request details:
It would be very beneficial if iNaturalist users (both the uploader and identifying members of the community) could flag specific photos in an observation for exclusion from the CV training set. This could function like the DQA, through a voting system.
This would have to be on a per-photo basis, as many observations contain both clear photos of the organism and non-organismal photos such as spectrograms.
I’m no UI designer, but my first thought would be to add an option to the existing photo-specific UI to toggle your own vote on the flag of an image. The null state prior to having voted would visually match the “Yes, use for CV” option (here, I use an open eye):
Clicking it would first set your vote to “No, don’t use for CV” (for which I’m using a closed eye) and then toggle it back and forth.
For details on the current status of the image’s overall tally, and to remove your vote entirely, you could click on the photo info option that already exists, and see an additional option on the photo info page that functions the way DQA do. Here I’ve used the label “Is Photo of Organism?” to try to most directly get at the intended use of the flag, though a tooltip could be used to expand on it.
I thought that something like “Use for AI training” could be misconstrued as a rights statement, or as an option that relates to AI datasets scraped by third parties, or other AI questions not related to the purpose of training iNat’s own CV on photos of actual organisms.
One thing I haven’t addressed here is scat, tracks, constructions, etc. These are photographic evidence that is clearly related to the organism. Because we already tag these in annotations, I thought that it might be possible to note the observation annotations in the CV training and take that into account in ways that can’t really be done with non-photographic evidence; on the other hand, we can’t tag specific photos as representing scat/tracks/etc., just the whole observation. In an ideal world, I think we should be able to apply those annotations to the photos themselves rather than (or in addition to?) a whole observation.