Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage
Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage
iNaturalist is a website that crowdsources pictures of plants and animals to help identify species. Its tagline is “A Community for Naturalists.” iNaturalist is administered by its own small charit…
They’re sure the people who do the work for free hate this whole plan only because there’s not enough “clarity” — and not because it’s a terrible idea.
I see this too often. Company makes a shit decision. People get angry. Company doesn't apologize for the decision, but for "not communicating clearly" as if people just didn't understand.
It's not that hard to throw up a website that allows user uploads. The community can replace iN in a heartbeat. They bought into their brand as the important thing, and not the contributors, and now they're probably going to slowly waste away.
Making a new thing is easy, filling up the database takes significantly more work, tho
Will nothing be spared from the AI-pocalypse? I made nearly 100 observations for them over the past 2 years.
Guess I get to look somewhere else to help out now.Been using Obsidentify for a while, seems like a worthy alternative.
Has anyone else noticed their identification app, Seek, has dramatically worsened in identification ability? Not recently, more like over the last I wanna say year or so.
I've noticed the opposite with Seek. It's way better now, especially with insects and fungi.
Oh interestingggg... I can only tell it's messing up with plants, since plants are what I know. I've just been mostly taking it at it's word for insects/fungi/etc, good to hear that's been working out!
Could the problem be area specific? My initial thought was, if people are submitting lots of erroneous IDs near me, maybe it's messing up the data?