I think this would be helpful, like the little pop up in cornell lab’s merlin bird id.
Also could some pls explain what in the name of a pumpkin toadlet is going on? My brain literally exploded trying to understand whats happening after reading this thread. Has inat changed? How? When?
For starters, have you read the official blog post? After that maybe read Tony’s replies on the thread, then if you’re still interested the top 100 posts are condensed in the “stacked layers button” on the bottom right. But no, nothing has changed yet, and we won’t be seeing anything new until the end of the year by the sounds of it.
Thanks! Idk how I didn’t read the blog post before. So basically generative Ai is going to not just suggest an id, but how to confirm it aswell?
Nobody, including the iNat staff, know how it’s going to look yet. They’re going to spend the year discussing and experimenting with ideas, and then release an experimental demonstration later for everyone to test.
The current computer vision that suggests ID is a kind of AI, but not “generative AI”. It gives answers from a pre-determined list of taxa; it doesn’t do any writing of its own. Generative AI is AI that can produce its own “original”* writing (or images/video). There are many different ways that could be implemented into iNat and so far there are only ideas about how it might be done.
*But the content it produces is derived entirely from human-created materials that it’s studied, so the extent to which its new writing is “original” is legally and philosophically controversial (in what ways is that the same or different from a human doing the same?), and they have a tendency to make stuff up, which is in part where all the drama comes from.
So no one know’s what’s gonna happen?
More or less. I mean we know some things, and lots of people have concerns about those things. But a lot is still to be seen. This is the latest update:
Ok then! In that case, my only worry is whether a thing can be abolished from inat with a community veto once it’s been added. If so, people could just wait to see how this new tool’s gonna function. If it’s rubbish, I believe that the strength of the whole community will yeet it back to the deepest pits of hell. If it’s tolerable/great, then yay! That is, assuming we could remove it if it sucks.
I read up to comment 457 (didn’t have it “summarized by chat xyz”, because I learned how to read at a young age), and its interesting to see how many people clocked this absolute non-answer of an update. Kudos to them.
I’m not gonna go on and on about what’s being said, because I know that no matter what I say, iNat isn’t gonna care. It’s been painfully obvious that they are flustered by the response to their announcement (though it’s unprofessional to shut off blog post comments and give your user base radio silence after such a polarizing announcement), but it seems that they are still set on doing what they explicitly said they were going to do, regardless of what different things they call it going forward.
The priorities of iNat have been made clear, and putting the desires of big corperations over your users is what I can’t agree with. Simple as that.
Although you’re still right, Influence Watch isn’t a good source since its owned by an organisation which is more politically biased than necessary. All good if you didn’t know though, it can unfortunately be hard to check how good sources are.
Summary of multiple sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Research_Center
it isn’t a good source in this case because it’s wrong. any conclusions based on the IW page are also wrong.
100% correct. Asking for a few days to get a formal response together is one thing. But it’s been over a month now. The hope is very clearly that we all have the memory of an urban legend goldfish and will simply stop being angry if they wait long enough and hope we forget.
Oh of course, I was just a bit worried about sounding too political on here if I said it like you did. But yeah, its a pretty terrible source lol
We know AI generated images are ending up on iNaturalist and so could be AI comments (and increased likelihood in the future) so a future AI’s input will be feeding itself. :)
No need to overthink it. And please do not delete your account (and so photos/IDs etc…), they are still a contribution and some additional feature not yet even implemented or not essential to the workflow of iNaturalist won’t affect it.
What staff said is they’re only trying things out, it’s only a demo. It has been repeated on the reasons why blog was turned off in this thread already (easier to receive feedback through a dedicated form or you can comment on forum for example). Lack of updates can be explained by the fact that the feature idea is still being figured out.
Edit: reminder to anyone reading - staff said that you will be able to opt out
So it’s been over a month…
…I signed up for the q&a thing, and crickets
…I see there was a post from twaine 20 days ago
…Uh…anything else?
Look. We didn’t just post our abhorrence at this project and vanish.
I don’t want a “prototype” at the end of the year released and then have it be too late to retract what I have given to the site so it doesn’t get eaten up by a genAI machine. If there is a working demo, that means the data’s already been fed, I would think…
Thus, this point, it’s just how long do I wait until I pull the plug? Because there is a total lack of transparency, a lot of double talking, and this is far too big an issue to just leave to chance. And for everyone saying “but science!” we functioned as scientists far before iNat existed, and there are other ways to manage datasets. If you are that conditioned to needing a computer to think for you, maybe rethink being a scientist. iNat has done great things, getting into bed with genAI is not one of them; instead it is a nail in the coffin of science, thinking, and reason.
I actually stopped following this thread some time ago, but I’ve just taken a glance in an idle moment. Nothing new, but… while individual iNaturalist users are obviously 100% free to express their own opinions, I really wish they wouldn’t write as though they represented the entire iNat userbase. This is not the case. There are a certain number of iNaturalist users participating in this forum and this thread who are more or less vehemently against the introduction of generative AI into iNaturalist, even as a demo. This discussion says no more than that. Full stop.
This is where most of the userbase is - observing and identifying.
Great Southern Bioblitz coming up 24-27 October.
I wont even give until end of the year, as if the end of the year is a working prototype, it’s too late.
October 31. That’s my deadline. That’s MORE THAN FAIR amount of time for them to:
- Have a proper outline of the project and exactly what it will be
- Have a solid opt-in to the project, so no users are auto opted in without their concent
- Have added account deletion options from an over-year-old feature request to add ways to delete including without removing ID’s for others along with anonimysation. If data loss is really such a problem to them (which I think it should be) not having a way to do such a type of delete should be TOP PRIORITY especially with all this genAI bs going on that is already it sounds like some power users have deleted accounts over.
- signed, someone with almost 25k ID’s for others, and almost 4k observations, including some firsts on the site (including new species to science) and other rare reports
I login with my iNat profile. One and the same.