Controversy brewing in the iNaturalist community over the nonprofit's partnership with Google to make generative-AI text content.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-this-inaturalist-and-generative-ai/66140
iNaturalist is the last big website where I can know the ant photos are real. :( And the IDs are so correct I haven't found an error and I love finding errors.
I don't think this would touch the photos but... WHY.
WHY.
@futurebird The described use seems targeted to resolve a recurring shortcoming of the site, and wouldn't touch the images.
But that they are oblivious to how a group of nature nerds might react to a sudden partnership with the tech death star? Does not bode well for the organization.
I have never thought "oh this site isn't fast enough with tentative IDs" It's working great and I like it. If anything from the other comments from the mite and silverfish people the IDs come in too quickly and this can cause mistakes.
I'm not someone who thinks AI can never be used to do anything. It's very good at speech to text.
But having watched the state of free information on insects go from "OK" to "unusable" on the rest of the web due to AI this just scares me.
@futurebird @alexwild Reading the linked thread (well the first 7 comments or so) it seems like there's a use case for machine learning based language models but bringing GOOGLE of all companies in makes one expect the "quality" highlighted in google search AI results and, well, that seems like an association you'd want to avoid at all costs.
@futurebird @r343l @alexwild I’m not taking this well either.
@ClimateJenny @futurebird @r343l @alexwild
Agreed. I only saw this because Alex posted. My pop-ups only show donation asks and a job opening for a mobile developer.
@kellyromanych @ClimateJenny @futurebird @r343l @alexwild
I look forward to seeing what iNat says about it when they publish their promised blog post.
That said, I just added this to the top of my iNat profile:
I DO NOT CONSENT to any of my iNat content being used by Google in any way, for any purpose, EVEN to "benefit" iNaturalist.
@xris @ClimateJenny @futurebird @r343l @alexwild
I'm going to do the same
@kellyromanych @xris @ClimateJenny @futurebird @r343l @alexwild note that if you have your contributions set to a Creative Commons license that doesn't prohibit derivatives and commercial use, you've already granted them (and everyone else) irrevocable permission to do pretty much whatever they want with them.
You can change the license field, but that doesn't have any legal effect on anyone who accessed your contributions under the original license. The best you can do is change the license for new contributions (if any) going forward and hope that courts decide that AI stuff doesn't get a total exemption from copyright laws.
@adrake @kellyromanych @xris @ClimateJenny @futurebird @r343l @alexwild
Please don't change your observation licenses. It will harm those of use who use your invaluable iNaturalist observations for research. And it will do nothing to prevent anyone from using your text in an AI capacity.