I can see the attraction of LLMs here; when the quality and volume of input is high, the quality of output can be high, too. In groups where there is a lot of taxon expertise, there’s a large community to draw on, and it can synthesised.
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(Though I have serious doubts that even this synthesis will be half as good as that which the already existing experts on iNat would be able to put together through a wiki or equivalent community-led annotation/guide)
In my case, the community is small. In fact, for many taxa, it seems I’m the only active iNat user who actually knows how to identify them properly. After all, I described quite a few of them myself.
Also, my own abilities (and the taxonomy) have changed over a decade using iNat. Accommodating these subtleties will be extremely hard for an LLMonster.
What I really don’t understand is why community-based organisations like iNaturalist are hopping into the genAI train without asking their communities whether they could see a use case for genAI. The response has been almost universally negative here, and for others before.
I think the team at @inaturalist.bsky.social need to sit down and read the comments and feedback that they are getting on their blogpost, and across social media, and seriously consider if this endeavour is going to be able to deliver what they want it to deliver, without estranging their user base.
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