sus_scrofa's Journal

I strongly oppose and condemn iNat's project (https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/113184) to "improve" species suggestions using generative AI. This project - funded by, advised by, and open to being infrastructurally supported by Google - is a mistake.

For those familiar with species identification and AI tools, it should be obvious that trying to use an LLM to explain the reasoning behind a species ID is a blatantly silly idea. Without constant verification by expert IDers, it will be untrustworthy, misleading, and unaccountable. For it to be usable, it would take so much AI-babysitting work from expert IDers that it would have been much easier, simpler, more reliable, and more community-focused for those expert IDers to have built a user-edited wiki in the first place.

While the iNat computer vision is an amazing tool for science, generative AI (a very different technology) is, as iNat plans to implement it, decidedly not. In fact, it is anti-science: it stands to make community science worse.

If I want to learn why my observation is what it is, I want to hear from a person. A person has reasons, and can articulate those reasons. A person can explain why. I want to hear a taxonomist's nuance, an amateur's passion, an expert's tip. Most importantly, a person can cite their sources. A person can admit when they aren't sure, when it's a "most likely this" kind of situation, when it's more vibes and gestalt than professionally keyed out.

GenAI can do none of this, simply because GenAI does not have reasons and cannot articulate reasons. Forcibly training a glorified autocomplete, until it appears like it can sort of articulate reasons, most of the time, is an extremely inefficient and alienating use of your community of IDers.

iNat is precious to me. I love it. It has woven webs of trust, balanced accessibility with expertise, and built a fun, empowering ecosystem of learning.

It is this sense of community that is iNat's greatest asset. It is the very thing that makes it unique. And it is exactly this that is threatened by its GenAI project.

We didn't ask for this. We don't want it. Please get rid of it.

Many have voiced concerns with GenAI that I consider broader and more structural in nature. Some of these include data privacy concerns, intellectual property / labor concerns, environmental concerns, and concerns related to Google, including its well-known business model of allowing small orgs to use their compute power while eventually making them dependent on Google computing services.

I believe many of these wider, systemic concerns are, to varying degrees, valid reasons to condemn this use of GenAI.

The salient point is that even if none of these concerns existed, I still wouldn't support this use of GenAI. Even if training the LLM had zero carbon costs and was funded by another company, I would still condemn it, simply because it can do nothing but make community science worse.

Even if you haven't seen what the AI tech bubble has been doing to our world, you should still oppose this project, for the utterly pragmatic reason that a fancy autocomplete does not and cannot reason about why a particular observation was identified to its particular taxon, nor can it articulate such a reason.

Until this is addressed, I'm scaling back my observations, IDs, comments, donations and activity on iNat. In addition, I do not consent to the use of my data to train a genAI model or LLM.

P.S. I'd happily contribute my time and expertise to a user-edited wiki or similar community-driven project to improve iNat species suggestions.

P.P.S. the one use case I can envision for LLMs on iNat is as a functionality of an iNat-internal search engine that helps users easily search iNat obs and pages to find comments, notes, ID explanations, etc. that are relevant to their search keywords. It is in this kind of search engine role - as a circumscribed library-research-type tool - that a glorified autocomplete may not be completely useless. Of course, the AI slop vision laid out by the iNat team in their blog post has little to do with this idea. This hypothetical use case for genAI on iNat is also not immune to the broader structural concerns mentioned earlier.

P.P.P.S. Here are some resources discussing Google's predatory business model.

An article in Bloomberg writes: “Google lured billions of consumers to its digital services by offering copious free cloud storage. That’s beginning to change.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-22/gmail-hooked-us-on-free-storage-now-google-is-making-us-pay

The New York Times, in the article “How Google Took Over the Classroom”: “This became Google’s education marketing playbook: Woo school officials with easy-to-use, money-saving services.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html

Or this paper on how, in educational institutions, Google “extracts personal data”, “skirts laws”, and “obfuscates the company’s intent”, that argues “that educators and scholars more closely interrogate the tools of Google.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7972328/

Or this paper which shows “how Google’s business model is concealed within Google Apps for Education”. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1474904116654917?icid=int.sj-full-text.similar-articles.5

This is a little story about my experiences with urban ecology and the incredible power of iNat to connect people and make stuff happen!!!!!! :D

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For the vast majority of my conscious life, I've lived here in NYC. I love this city dearly. But until recently, I feel I haven't really gotten to know it. Not really. I've always known where to find the best bagels (pre-pandemic: Absolute, now: Popup), the best slice (Rosie's "bee sting", dont @ me), the best halal cart (I'll never reveal my secrets).

But before iNat, I didn't know a thing about the real city. The ecological communities that constitute the true bulk of NYC life, while us apes strut about as if we own the place (as if we possibly could). Our interspecific siblings, our partners in an immense, ancient, ever-changing system to which we are inextricably linked. The incomprehensibly vast and dynamic nexus that suffuses every sidewalk crack, every sewer grate, every human body with living, breathing life.

iNat opened my eyes to this world, and I'll always be thankful for it. For that alone I owe iNat so much, but also, for so much else too! Like, for example...

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Last year, @tohmi very kindly messaged me on iNat and invited me to the Sixth Annual EcoFlora Conference, hosted by the New York City EcoFlora project (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/new-york-city-ecoflora - go check them out! They rule!). One of the talks at the conference was a great lecture, given by Dr. Eric Sanderson of the NYBG, on concrete ways to make the concrete jungle better for plants (and therefore better for people).

A full recording of the conference can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6PZRnwGYRw
Dr. Sanderson's talk starts around 1:12:00.

After attending this fantastic conference, I was excited, galvanized, inspired. I wanted to learn more about the city's ecological history. So I started reading Eric Sanderson's book, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (Abrams, New York, 2009). It's an incredible read! I highly recommend it.

The book reconstructs the ecology of Manhattan Island in the year 1609, just prior to European arrival. It even included a list of vascular flora thought to have been present on the island at that time! That's when I really got excited.

I was like: this list is amazing! What a spectacular resource! What an incredible effort of a decade of hard work and all the latest tools in GIS and landscape ecology! How amazing is it that we can look centuries into the past and perceive those same botanical communities that the Lenape, the rightful stewards of this land, would have seen in 1609!

I HAVE to do something with this list!!

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And so I did.

I wanted the list to be tabulated. So I put it all into a spreadsheet.

I also wanted the list to reflect updated botanical taxonomy (a lot's changed since 2009). So I did my best to update the taxonomy too.

Finally, I wanted to understand how many of these plants were still present in the wild of NYC - and how many I myself have seen in the city. So I made an iNat project for it!

The project can be found here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/native-flora-of-mannahatta-and-welikia
I describe the project in some more detail here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/native-flora-of-mannahatta-and-welikia/journal/89138-about-this-project

And so that's just another way in which iNat has changed my life, connected me with wonderful people and amazing resources, and deepened my understanding of the city I call home.

Thanks for reading!