The “generative AI” mention in the grant is badly worded corporate buzzspeak, and doesn’t accurately reflect anything that will be used here - disregard any association to what you normally expect from those words

In the blog post, they described a specific feature they wanted to develop, and linked to a blog post from last year that said they wanted to use a Vision Language Model, which is essentially an LLM with some visual processing stuff attached. This isn’t badly worded corporate buzzspeak, they very clearly gave an example of what they wanted to do and have had a plan in place for at least a year now that involves using generative AI.

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Personally, the contradictions between what was said in the blog posts, both a year ago and a few days ago, and what has been said on the forums since then are making it hard to feel like I can trust anything the staff now say about this project. It feels like they’re either wildly backpedalling or have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to AI, and if it’s the former I’d much prefer for them to just say “we’ve listened to the community’s responses and have decided to pivot towards developing something more like this instead of the original plan to use genAI”.

Maybe I’m just incredibly cynical, but I don’t see how saying you want to use a very specific kind of genAI and showcasing a mockup of the feature you want to implement and have apparently been planning for at least a year could be passed off as just “badly worded corporate buzzspeak”

[–] flora_explora@beehaw.org -1 points 4 hours ago

Well sure, I also felt annoyed when they first announced generative AI. But I'm pretty confident in that iNat staff isn't doing anything malicious and this example shows how they were thinking of an actual way to use generative AI in a productive way. Will this feature ever make it? Probably not, because all the testing to get it to sufficient accuracy would be enormous.

Another example of generative AI (if I'm not mistaken) would be the feature they are testing, where you can type in something to search for taxa.

Both times they use generative AI as a specific tool for a specific task and in both cases I'm confident in that they will be checking for a certain accuracy. The iNat staff is very much connected with the naturalist users and are really motivated to make iNat better (just look through the forum).

On the other hand, considering deleting your iNat account just because they mention generative AI seems like being caught in the AI hype train as well, but just on the other side of it. Not all generative AI has to be bad, as long as it is used as a specific tool for a specific problem and in consideration of its limitations.