it’s inappropriate to ask to see other folks’ grant proposals. no outside party would never ask to see your grant proposals at your work, or if they did, you would never provide them that information, unless your workplace is some sort of public entity that requires disclosure of such things.
if you want to see the Google.org Gen AI Accelerator application template, you can find copies of it online. the general timeline for the accelerator program is noted as 6 months, and “product definition and strategy” phase of it will last the first couple of months or so. i wouldn’t expect to see any additional information from staff to the community until near the end of that period.
that’s really the only relevant piece of information that hasn’t already been addressed. it’s really not your place to specify timelines, nor to provide oversight, nor to be involved in the nitty-gritty of design. if you’ve already provided feedback, then just trust that staff will do what they have said they will do. it won’t help to have backseat drivers or folks constantly asking, “are we there yet?”.
I can understand the need to keep secret the content of a grant application/proposal, or even refusing to disclose whether they applied for a grant (to avoid backlash by anti-AI anti-Goog persons).
However, I can’t understand why once they get the grant iNat would refuse to reveal (even if summarily) what timeline/goal/motive/technique/overview/project they had in mind – describing what they put in their application, more or less. At the moment and for the last 2 months, the only info has been rather unclear and conflicting (and the ‘announcement’ of the grant surfaced only through some thirdparty exhuming a tweet!)
By using generative AI (GenAI), we hope to synthesize information about how to distinguish different species and accurately convey that to iNaturalist users.
Our goal is to build a working demo by the end of the year, and we’ll share more updates as the project evolves.
Ultimately, we want to continue synthesizing information across iNaturalist so that it’s more useful and accessible.
Since this project is in its early stages, we don’t know exactly what this will look like, but we will share updates to be more transparent moving forward.
additional notes from loarie:
…
i don’t see any instances of conflicting information from staff. if you see something that looks conflicting to you, point to exactly what you’re talking about.
maybe it’s unclear in some cases. a lot of that is probably just that there is no detailed plan yet. some of it is just imprecise language.
it seems like your main concern here is that you think they’re trying to hide something, and i just don’t see any evidence that that’s something to worry about here. instead of reading wrongdoing into everything, take a step back, assume good intent, and read everything again.
If that was not clear from my past posts to this thread (read them again, thx), I’m not assuming or even expecting much from iNat at this point – no ill intent or conspiracy or whatever. They jump the AI bandwagon like everybody, good for them, have fun with your new toy.
I’m genuinely surprised that Google hands out so much money in exchange for so little detailed information in a grant application – for someone to “maybe” “explore” “probably” “a demo” “in some way” but “don’t know”. But hey, their cash, their problem.
(Agreed, coming from academia, I may be misinformed about what “grant” implies in the industry/private sector; it could be that the requirements are waaaay more relaxed there).
@DianaStuder Huh, why? I keep very few of my obs on iNat these days, and only “trivial” ones. I also removed all my IDs and comments, since it brings nothing but annoyances, and could “maybe eventually” be fed to some stupid LLM. Does it matter how much data one has on the site to be able to express one’s opinion? Is that a rule? Are you a mod?
She likely searched up your forum username on iNaturalist, to try to find an iNaturalist account of the same name. A lot of people here on the forums have their forum accounts named after their iNaturalist accounts.
No, Diana is not a forum moderator, iNaturalist curator, or iNaturalist staff member.
They want to be able to claim that only people with what they consider a good ammount of observations to have opinions that can or should matter. Don’t let yourself be bullied about how many observations you have. Every observation matters, or this site wouldn’t exist in the first place.
While I have made no secret of the fact that I don’t trust genAI and can’t wait for the fad to die, I think some of the reactions are way too extreme. Yes it’s annoying, yes it may lead to an increased amount of mis ID’s, but not worth deleting your account over imo. If you really want to do so go ahead, but keep in mind that doing so will likely have negative impact beyond simply sticking it to the inat staff
I also would like to have some more concrete information about what is going on at iNat HQ. if details are not ready for release, can I have some idea what resources and time are being dedicated? I think resolving this crisis should be very high priority, just after keeping the servers functional.
however, there is no need to keep picking fights. this isn’t the time and place for hostility. the staff made a series of rather bad mistakes, and haven’t really fixed it yet. that is totally different from selling out, from deliberate enshittification on behalf of shareholders, or from anything malicious.
there’s so much real evil in the world, and so many people who need help - likely in your own neighbourhood. consider putting your frustration towards other ends.
crisis seems hyperbolic. as much as i agree with your sentiment that folks need to simmer down, casually throwing around terms like crisis and enshittification doesn’t seem to help calm things down.
This how I see this:
Google provided some funds and some tech for goodwill (and validation of integration of said tech)
Now Google offers some more funds and some added tech for goodwill and advice - a demo is just that.
iNaturalist will benefit from staff discussing what to do next, at Google’s expense. Google will get evaluation of their tech at the fraction of the cost of hiring consulting firms. Good deal for everyone.
Given the deliverable is a demo, not a prototype or a proof-of-concept, it is for evaluation and not immediate implementation. Wait and see.
But if it is a working demo, as the point is to feed comments into the machine to have it generate ID tips, that means comments are being fed.
We need to know a deadline for when this is planned to start occurring. We also need a statement that this will indeed be opt-in only. That’s…such a simple request. So a few people continually yellin’ at us for being unreasonable is…wow. Especially going on 7 weeks of silence.
I checked the stats page, and found this interesting. In early June we were at 488k active users. Now, we are 401K. The major dropoff that has slowly waned further since, happened corresponding to the announcement. That is almost a 1/5 drop in users due to this.
I dunno about you, but an almost 20% reduction of users - and mind you these would be active engaged users as you’d have to be to notice the blog post or forum - should, as Astra said, be seen as a crisis. That’s not throwing words around, that is describing the situation.
nonsense. i wish folks would stop posting misinformation.
the stats that you’re referencing – look for Active Users on the stats page, and get the Max time period – show 488k trailing-30-day active users at June 4th and a drop to 430k at June 5th. the Google Accelerator program recipients weren’t even announced until June 9th.
think for a moment and ask yourself what might have been happening 30 days prior to June 4th? (UPDATE: this explains the rise in active daily users leading up the this time, and a technical change in how the statistic is counted, as noted by tiwane below, accounts for most of the specific drop between June 4th and June 5th.)
we only have a year’s worth of data, but look at the year trend, compare today vs last year, and see if you can see how it might be expected that there’s a (northern hemisphere) summer drop in users.
According to Wikipedia: “Google.org, founded in October 2005, is the charitable arm of Google, a multinational technology company… Google.org is considered a part of Google, as opposed to an Alphabet organization, under the formation of the Alphabet parent company in 2016.”
So I don’t think your statement that it is a “distinct entity” is completely accurate.
Pisum is correct: there’s a sharp drop in “Active Users” every year in early June due to a huge surge in first-and-only time users during the City Nature Challenge plus the way the stat is calculated (any activity at all in the past 30 days). The graph shows we had 380,000 users at this time last year. It’s possible that +20,000 users is less growth than expected, but I suspect the actual impact on number of active users has been negligible.
Edit: see Tiwane’s post below. The annual blip from CNC was actually a few days before, where it briefly went down to 460,000 on May 29th. This matches up better with the CNC days at the end of April.
I’m pretty sure 90% of Inat users don’t check the posts or forum, and active user means “within the last 30 days”. Plus a lot of end of year high school biology classes do bioblitzes in May.
The drop at the beginning of June is likely due to a change in the way we counted “Created an ID”.
We found we were counting automatically-updated IDs as “activity” for the “Active Users” stats. So for example, if user X added an ID in 2023 and never came back to iNat, and that ID was updated by the system due to a taxon change in June 2025, that updated ID being added to the observation would count as “activity” for the account. And the account would be considered an “active user”. So the number of active users in the count were higher than the number of people actively contributing to the site.
We added a change around the beginning of June that no longer considers those types of ID updates as “activity”, which likely accounts for the steep drop-off around that time. That jump at the end of May after a bit of a dip was what caught our eye and I believe it coincided with a taxon change or changes that affected a lot of IDs.
It seems to me that a majority of professional taxonomists I have talked to share your worries (I also do).
Just because you see little support here does not mean it doesn’t exist. This forum is a tiny slice of the expertise, with a heavy bias towards people with a tech interest.
Just a thought here: I’ve seen multiple messages that ask why not create a wiki instead of resorting to some version of AI that presumably would gather ID text from iNat records. Why can’t it be both? If the AI that iNat comes up with is mainly involved with finding text and pasting it into some sort of interactive field associated with a taxon, it would make sense to clearly mark that text as draft AI-generated, subject to revision by iNat taxon specialists. The AI would do the tedious grunt work of finding and organizing the information from thousands of records and putting it where it can be reviewed, the humans would then review and revise as needed. No AI-generated text would be considered “good” until reviewed.