Thanks @graysquirrel for spending time today and helping talk through how we got here.
I want to assure everyone that WE ARE NOT CHANGING THE DIRECTION OF iNATURALIST. As I say every chance I get (and really mean it) iNat is great because the community is great. iNat is the community. I can assure you that I and the entire iNat team hates the AI slop that’s taking over the internet as much as you do. Thank you for trusting us as stewards of this awesome people-powered community and website
On top of that, I want to reiterate that:
- We are listening and taking all your concerns really seriously. I’m learning a lot.
- We really screwed up the communication on this, I take responsibility for that. We messed up, I’m sorry for giving everyone gray hairs this week.
Some quick reassurances:
This grant is very standard alongside the kinds of philanthropic grants we’ve depended on to keep the lights on here. Whether it’s Microsoft AI for Earth or Amazon Open Data Program or Google Earth Outreach, we don’t always love that we’re so dependent on these kinds of grants or credits, but applying for these grants is how we’ve managed to keep iNaturalist online and non-commercial for going on 18 years. These are grants, they get nothing in return except for some of the glow of supporting awesome social initiatives like iNat. We get money or credits.
Google.org isn’t expecting anything from this grant except for us to explore Gen AI technology in the context of our work to come up with solutions for how to better surface and organize expertise on the site.
Our grant deliverable is to make a demo. Many of you saw the Vision-Language demo we made as part of a grant with Microsoft AI for Good program to help run our servers. We didn’t end up integrating this vision-language technology into the site, but we did learn a lot and it directly led to the Photo Similarity feature we released that we love. Gen AI means so many things to different people, but to us it probably means that the demo we will make will leverage interacting with an LLM in some way. We are still figuring out specifics of how LLMs might play a role in this demo, and honestly don’t know more than that at this point, but we are listening to your feedback and concerns (e.g. making it opt-out) as we proceed.
This grant will fund a lot more than just that demo, and I think we’ll learn a lot about how the tech landscape is evolving and what that means for iNat. If the demo is not helping it won’t get integrated into the site. And let me reiterate: there’s no way we’re going to unleash AI generated slop onto the site. iNaturalist is about human connection and expertise and using technology to help elevate and support that.
We are working really hard to do a lot of things at the same time: stay focused on the iNat community, surface all of your expertise and hard work, hustle to fund our small non-commercial nonprofit, stay up to date on the (very rapidly evolving) tech landscape, and more. We will have more for you about this grant and project after the weekend. But I hope writing this will help reassure people going into the weekend. Again I’m very sorry for the miscommunication on our side.