Some banks, gov and public sector services in some countries, transport services affected. No doubt airports took a hit too.

A big shiny ad for decentralisation, data sovereignty, self-hosting.

@jbz To quote that Scientific American article, “iNaturalist’s executive director Scott Loarie wrote, “There’s no way we’re going to unleash AI generated slop onto the site. iNaturalist is about human connection and expertise and using technology to help elevate and support that.””

I think this issue has been blown out of proportion, at least as it affects iNaturalist. The biggest take home message, for me, which seems more relevant for Google than iNaturalist, is that *a lot* of iNaturalist users *really hate* general LLMs (“AI”).

Investors and shareholders might be pressing companies like Google to double down on AI but this iNat issue underscores that a lot of general tech users would much rather they didn’t.

iNat misread the room on this in their exploration of ways to deal with their growing imbalance between how more observations are being submitted than there are volunteer identifiers for some taxonomic groups. Still, I trust people like Scott not to break iNat with LLMs. They’re not doing iNat for venture capitalist money or ad revenue (they’re a non-profit and there are no ads on the platform). They’re investing their lives in building iNat to connect people to nature and help biodiversity.

#iNaturalist