To use an analogy, in my opinion this is a bit like this: say I created a painting. A kid takes a picture of my painting because they love it, and draws or traces an exact copy to put on their wall. Simultaneously, a large corporation makes an unauthorized scan of the painting, prints industrial quantities of it, and hands them out to anyone and everyone with no credit or indication that they did not originate the work. There is a difference in these two scenarios wouldn’t you agree? Scale, intent, credit, these all play a role in how the creator would feel about this. And the law agrees with me, one of these is fair use and the other is not.
And even if you ask it to credit specific indvidiuals when citing them, we’ve seen just how that would turn out in this very thread. It confidently ascribes sentences and sentiments to people who never even said them. What if the AI leaves a tip on an observation that says “According to user hawkparty, you can identify this mushroom by its light color and pleasant taste”, and the poster gets hospitalized because it was actually a poisonous mushroom. Am I liable now? Do I have to worry about getting sued? These aren’t things I want to have to worry about on a website I use for fun.
In addition, this reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague when Copilot and other similar “code generating” AIs were becoming a topic in my professional field:
He said that in his opinion, the code that the AI generated was about on par with the work of an intern or a particularly green junior programmer, in that it needed some work to be made functional but could be used for basic tasks. The difference, according to him, was that you hired interns and juniors with the expectation they would learn and grow. You don’t hire them for efficiency, a senior engineer could write all the same things twice as fast and without the need to clean up and fix the work, the reason you hire them is because over time they improve, they take feedback from the seniors, and they accumulate knowledge, so that they can begin to tackle more complex tasks and even start designing and architecting, two things which GenAI has remained absolutely abysmal at. They eventually become senior engineers who can then train more juniors in the same way, thus is the cycle of tech dev.
The AI was, in the exact words of my college, “an eternal junior”. It never learned or improved and it didn’t take feedback, it just kept generating the same kind of crappy code that required more work to clean up and fix. There was no point to it when plenty of juniors already exist(and that it takes away from their opportunities. If the AI is doing all the junior work, how are they supposed to get experience to become seniors?). The reason some companies have gone ahead with implementing these is because of the rather straightfoward concept that you have to pay juniors and you do not have to pay the AI. So it’s cheaper to have the AI churn out the work of a couple dozen juniors and then have one senior engineer paid to fix it.
However in iNaturalist’s case Robo here was already providing their work for free. And they aren’t compelled to continue offering it. If they decide to leave, there is no senior on the payroll who can fix the AI’s output. It’s just going to continue spewing incorrect and poorly sourced misinformation without ever learning like a person might and nobody will be around to correct it.
Also, in the case of people, they usually have some unique perspective or ability they bring to the table. Maybe that new identifier speaks a language Robo doesn’t, so they can translate the tips to reach more people. Maybe Robo points them in the direction of some of the sources they use and that identifier discovers something new that’s been overlooked. And in time they can become a new experienced identifier that also provides knowledge to others. If these people leave, regardless of how “valid” you think their reasons for doing so are, you get the “garbage in, garbage out” problem. The GenAI continues to produce slop because all the skilled users have removed their data from the training pool and left, and in turn all it has to take in again is its own slop. You can imagine the end result.
I see a lot of AI enthusiasts constantly espousing that it doesn’t matter if people don’t like AI, because the AI can just replace them. But what they miss is that without these people, the AI has nothing. It is trained on their work, all it can do is reproduce it. The feelings of these people matter because as they leave, as they remove their data from the internet or refuse to publish it so that it can be scraped, all the AI can do is continue to subsist off its own slop. You can’t make a device reliant on the labor of others and then claim that it doesn’t matter how they feel about it because you can just replace them. iNaturalist should take note of that.
(And, only marginally related, I want to bring back my liability questions. Disney has recently initiated a massive lawsuit against GenAI company Midjourney. Does iNaturalist really want to open itself to this kind of legal action? Even if they end up being validated by a court of law, that’s a protracted legal battle that I frankly doubt iNaturalist can afford)