It’s interesting to see how different the response to the subject of generative AI is from different people. There seem to be information silos, where for example my impression is that people on Bluesky as a group tend to be pretty closed to the concept whereas on Twitter people tend to be more open to exploring their potential. You can see that here with conflicting beliefs about the environmental impacts (and assuming that everyone shares their belief), although maybe less differences on the ethics.
I appreciate the clarification here; I was confused about people concerned that their images and comments might be used for training, as I had kind of taken for granted that iNat content was probably already being used for AI training of some sort, somewhere. Other photo-storing websites like Flickr and eBird/Macaulay Library prevent downloading of users’ images, and other social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter prevent you from browsing user content without logging in. iNaturalist has no restrictions like that, so anyone on the internet can easily find anything on iNat and download it. There have been a least a couple examples of scam websites claiming to be selling photos stolen from iNat. But I suppose that’s a different subject than explicitly giving someone permission to train on content.