What is this - iNaturalist and generative AI?

For everyone concerned about genAI environmental impacts, where do you stand on general energy/data usage of iNat?

If the cost of 1gb of data storage is 7kWh as this Stanford article states.
That´s 7000Wh for 1024Mb = 7Wh for 1Mb give or take.
So using the genAI prompt cost of 3Wh that’s roughly equivalent to a 1 x 500Kb photo upload here. Whilst a laptop using 50 watts for 1 hour to be on the site would consume 50Wh.

Of the staunchly anti-genAI due to environmental cost folks…are you really so rigorous about the minutiae of your energy costs ?.. how conscious are people of their file sizes when uploading? How conscious are you of the energy usage of your computer when using it for iNat? Or of energy usage of your computer and cloud storage more generally?

Genuinely curious where your lines are in the sand when it comes to online energy usage.

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I’ve hidden posts that are arguing about the word “bribe” that’s being used in a video/post by someone not on iNat or on this forum, it became a semantic back-and-forth and was not constructive, I’m sorry.

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Well, literally just came here to say I’ll be deleting my inaturalist account. even with the “clarification” posted, the fact that it completely contradicts what was said last year as pointed out by others in this thread, and the complete lack of an actual public, non-forum Official Blog Post from Inaturalist itself is very, very telling.

Even if Inat does not plan on implenting GenAI “now”, this is just step 1 in that process. Accepting money from Google to use their genative AI, despite the enviornmental and social impacts of genai in the first place, and against the communities wishes in 99% of users, just tells me where this road is heading.

Charities based on volunteer participation really need to remember that volunteers around the world are the reason they have any participation, as National Novel Writing Month found out when they announced they were partnering with generative AI companies in exchange for funding…

I’ll give it 24 hours or so to see if the actual official Inaturalist blog posts an actual full clarifying update now that its been nearly a month, but I don’t have my hopes up.

Inaturalist should remain by the people for the people, not creating more work for the people who already volunteer their time and effort to make identifications.

I can only imagine how many people are going to go out foraging with the future genai-assisted “identification guides” and eat toxic and poisonous mushrooms, which has already hospitalized people who unknowlingly used ai-generated physical books they thought they could trust…

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You don’t need to apologize for hiding unconstructive posts that would likely lead to endless arguing. Some of those posts would have possibly been flagged later anyways if they weren’t hidden now.

Thank you for hiding it.

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last thing I’ll post before leaving for the next 24 hours before I come back either here or to the official Inaturalist Blog to look for an official update:

In plain language that is easy to understand, from a staff member, can you please explain what exactly Inaturalist currently plans on implementing with Google’s Generative AI?

If you’re able to post such a thing here, please also communicate with whoever is in charge of the official Inaturalist Blog as well. Turning off the comments on the original Blog Post because of the huge amount of backlash has not left many people with a good sign that they’re being listened to, and many people are not going to go to a seprate forum post to look for more information.

If an Inaturalist Staff member could please state in plain language what the current plan for the Google Generative AI is going to be implemented on Inaturalist, that would be great and clear up a lot of the confusion.

bye for now . I’ll check back tomorrow or the day after

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I feel like if all of iNaturalists digital infrastructure was run off coal power. It still wouldnt be that large in the grand scheme of things largely because of scale. INaturalist is only a single digital nature oriented organization. Maybe somebody could do the math, would be interesting.

Your deleting your account in 24 hrs and your asking this? This sounds like you are missing much information and context.

This is incorrect, it was largely done becuase journal comment sections aren’t designed for huge discussions of 300+ comments in just 2 days. If it countinued that page would get laggier and laggier just like the Gerald observation also with 100s of comments.

Again you seem to be lacking context and have missed posts from staff in here. This is not surprising or of fault of your own as even here at a venue for large conversations, going through this huge discussion and finding exact comments is difficult without knowledge of filters and knowing exactly what your looking for.

I do still think that staff have not done that great of a job communicating though. Another journal post should have been made. There are useful staff comments in here buried amongst 100s of other comments.

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It is possibly annoying to some users that iNat relies partly on AWS (yuck!), and tolerates uploading tens of wasteful 2048px heavy files. Still, can’t really figure the logical articulation with uncritical acceptance of any additional future use of resources (even if minimal, as aptly pointed).

For those who were still reluctant, this debate on energy/resource consumption possible contributes new arguments for leaving iNat. Of the “all or nothing” kind – embrace it in full or else move along. (Fortunately, there’s at least one platform better suited to resource-conscious naturalists out there; essentially free of “evil” AWS/Google, not interested in GenAI yet, and with tighter upload limits, too. Not as pretty and populous and funny as here though.)

Anyways, everyone should be aware that someone has made a video about this, with over 6K views.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMc7sVrGKyU&t

This isn’t going to stay quiet, many people are upset about this and are already talking about it, here on the forum and on other sites, including youtube. Staff in particular should be aware of how people are taking this so that if it’s wrong, they can correct it whenever they get around to explaining to us what exactly it is they’re planning to do with generative AI on this site.

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Let’s assume you didn’t read the bylaws, as otherwise that’s very disingenuous: the bylaws make clear that the board of iNaturalist is self-perpetuating. Unless you are already on the board or are a staff member, there are zero ways to influence or make the changes you might want to see.

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I looked for Bluesky. Found one passing mention.
Since YouTube videos use power - I skimmed the transcript. Not much there.

What other sites?

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Also Scientific American, and a post on Crikey came up in search (never heard of them before).

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To put it another way: for those of you who have had some higher education, think of the professors you most admired and respected. Were they in the habit of giving you the answers? The educators we respect the most tend to be the ones who act more as guides while we find the answers for ourselves.

I agree. The conversation has become repetitive. I find it most interesting that the best ideas came out during the period when the number of posts declined to a few per day – almost seemed like a quality vs. quantity thing.

And also: which ones seem to have plagiarized each other. Seriously, there’s a lot of that on the internet: multiple low-quality websites (but perhaps SEO to get their banner ads seen) which can be near word-for-word duplicates of each other’s content. If you weren’t careful, you could get the impression that the “information” on them was widely accepted because of the number of places it appears.

I find it especially ironic, given this bar graph, that some people are linking to YouTube videos to make their case against GenAI. Doubly so given that YouTube is itself notorious as a repository of non-peer reviewed and even outright unreliable information, and no serious researcher would cite YouTube as a source unless the study was about media usage. Arguments about whether YouTube or GhatGPT is worse in this regard are (thankfully!) beyond the scope of the present thread.

I think it’s time for me to bow out, too.

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“we should improve society somewhat” “Yet you participate in society! Curious!” Alright lol if we’re going to pretend that using youtube is the same thing as endorsing the creation of brand new planet killing machines, then that is just an argument for everyone deleting their iNaturalist accounts, now isn’t it?

“Don’t create another machine that will kill the environment while greenwashing the machines that already kill the environment” “And yet machines that kill the environment already exist!”

Alright.

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