this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 21 hours ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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[–] flora_explora@beehaw.org -3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ebu@awful.systems 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)
  1. no one is assuming iNaturalist is being malicious, saying otherwise is just well-poisoning.
  2. there is no amount of testing that can ever overcome the inherently-stochastic output of LLMs. the "best-case" scenario is text-shaped slop that is more convincing, but not any more correct, which is an anti-goal for iNaturalist as a whole
  3. we've already had computer vision for ages. we've had google images for twenty years. there is absolutely no reason to bolt a slop generator of any kind to a search engine.
  4. "staff is very much connected with users" obviously should come with some asterisks given the massive disconnect between staff and users on their use and endorsement of spicy autocorrect
  5. framing users who delete their accounts in protest of machine slop being put up on iNaturalist, which is actually the point of contention here, as being over-reactive to the mere mention of AI, and thus being basically the same as the AI boosters? well, it's gross. iNat et. al. explicitly signaled that they were going to inject AI garbage into their site. users who didn't like that voted with their accounts and left. you don't get to post-hoc ascribe them a strawman rationale and declare them basically the same as the promptfans, fuck off with that
[–] flora_explora@beehaw.org -1 points 31 minutes ago

First of all, sorry if my comment sounded like I'm dismissing the position of other people commenting before me. I tried exploring the other side of the argument and am genuinely open to any outcome here.

  1. Hm yes, maybe not malicious, but the quoted portion from the iNat forum sounded very much like the person commenting described the iNat stuff as untrustworthy.

  2. I'm probably not knowledgeable enough to really have an opinion. I'd have thought that there are some use cases where generative AI can be helpful. But you have a point in that iNat actually relies on correct and trustworthy results.

  3. yeah, I get that and I'm not in favor of it either. But it's probably also a cost-benefit calculation for iNat to get a grant from Google and having to work on some sort of generative AI.

  4. Sorry, I'm out of the loop. What are you referring to?

  5. OK fair, maybe that was a bit much, sorry. I think it is a huge step to delete your account and leave a community just based on the mention of generative AI and I have a hard time getting into the head space. Like, sure, if you invested little time in the site. But I've put thousands of hours in iNat and would certainly need a strong incentive to delete my account...