Bastian Greshake Tzovaras

Last year I wrote a paper on how "GenAI" is a risk for #citizenscience (it being an academic paper it's still slowly dying in review). One of the points was that using "AI" devalues the contributions made by human volunteers, leading to contributors (rightfully) disengaging.

Yesterday, #inaturalist announced an "AI"-partnership with Google, and unsurprisingly that's exactly the backlash they got…

https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/113184-inaturalist-receives-grant-to-improve-species-suggestions

iNaturalist receives grant to improve species suggestions

iNaturalist is excited to announce an award from Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI to help build tools to improve the identification experience for the iNaturalist community. The project we proposed builds off of our demo from last year to search iNaturalist photos with text. The award from Google.org provides $1.5M over 2.5 years plus access to Google staff to advise the iNaturalist team. Our nonprofit mission is to connect people to nature through technology and advance science and conservation. We see this new opportunity with Google.org as a clear extension of the work that we’ve been doing for years to build better tools to connect people to nature. By using generative AI (GenAI), we hope to synthesize information about how to distinguish different species and accurately convey that to iNaturalist users. Instead of just offering AI species suggestions of what you saw, we want to offer a why as well. By providing explanations in addition to a list of suggestions, iNaturalist...

iNaturalist
Jun 11 at 5:29pmWeb
Show threadBastian Greshake Tzovaras4d ago
Not to mention that many folks who are regular contributors to #inaturalist are deeply invested into the environment and aren't fans of destroying it using 'GenAI - or that partnering with big-tech that destroys society in addition to nature might be 'a bit' tone-deaf in 2025…
Show threadCoho4d ago
@gedankenstuecke
A Michigan university agg department tested every plant ID app, seeing which one could be used by farmers to identify invasive weeds. Google came in last with only a 10% accuracy. The best app only got it right 50% of the time. They weren't asking for much just family and species. People are gonna die, picking foxglove, instead of comfrey , poison hemlock, mistaken for cow parsnip, death cap for matsutaki. To think inaturalist would partner with Google, the worst of the worst
Google ID's my cat as a flying squirrel and my gray and white manx as a bob cat. It identified a close up of the tiny grass gastridium as giant pompas grass. 🙄🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦
Show threadBastian Greshake Tzovaras4d ago
@Coho i think for iNaturalist it's not really the main use case, but still problematic!
Show threadtoni✨🧠3d ago

@gedankenstuecke Also lovely, that they compare image recognition with generative models. That is not the same thing, just because they both use the same marketing term “AI”. One can make sense for some applications, the other is a waste of energy to produce slop.

> “iNaturalist has been synthesizing photos and identifications using machine learning since 2017 to provide computer vision suggestions (a kind of AI)”