1w ago

Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage

pivot-to-ai.com

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Fuck AI @lemmy.world

e8d79 @discuss.tchncs.de

1w ago

Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage

pivot-to-ai.com /2025/06/19/google-bribes-inaturalist-to-use-generative-ai-volunteers-quit-in-outrage/

Citizen Science @mander.xyz

acockworkorange @mander.xyz

1w ago

Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage

pivot-to-ai.com /2025/06/19/google-bribes-inaturalist-to-use-generative-ai-volunteers-quit-in-outrage/

16 comments

I went through some of the links from the article, and there was an update pinned in one of them:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-this-inaturalist-and-generative-ai/66140/431
@procyonloiter and I just had a 3-hour in-person talk with @loarie and I am delighted to say that it has completely alleviated my concerns around this entire issue. I went into it seriously contemplating deleting my entire account and many years of work, and I have come out of it feeling like a massive weight has been lifted.
This whole thing has just been very poor messaging and some serious miscommunication, and DOES NOT indicate any actual shift in how iNat is planning to operate.
The lack of communication updates has been because everyone on staff is freaked out and overwhelmed by the amount of backlash, and in a bit of paralysis about how to appropriately respond. There is no nefarious reason for it.
The grant from google is indeed a grant, and they are not receiving any data or anything else in exchange for it (I’m sure they’re scraping and stealing stuff anyway but that’s true for anything posted online)
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
The vast majority of the funds will be used to cover normal operating costs of what iNat does every day. A small amount will be going to some specific grant-related projects, which, again, are not actually genAI. There is no guarantee these things will even be implemented on iNat in the end - if they suck, they’ll be tossed out.
The staff are very receptive to user concerns, and there will be a chance for people to speak to them and ask specific questions - since it’s a friday and everyone is in different time zones, the details haven’t been fully organized yet - I suggested maybe a drop-in zoom call, or something, where people can join and leave throughout a set time period, so it’s not overwhelmed by a ton of people all competing for talking space at once.
That doesn’t completely cover everything we spoke about, but I’m going to post this now to get it up in the thread- please feel free to ask any questions I might be able to answer!
- 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
  That sounds particularly suspect, coming with no answer as to what it does mean.
  
  I agree, and it's also a second hand account from someone who met with them.
  However it IS enough for me to hold off on deleting anything until I can hear more. My big concern was this point:
  The grant from google is indeed a grant, and they are not receiving any data or anything else in exchange for it (I’m sure they’re scraping and stealing stuff anyway but that’s true for anything posted online)
- yeah I suggest you keep reading the thread pointing out how they were explicitly talking about generative AI a year before
  
  This is the bit:
  seblivia
  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.
  image
  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”
Google has a market cap of about 2.1 trillion dollars. Therefore the stock price only has to go up by about 0,00007 percent following the iNaturalist announcement for this "investment" to pay off. Of course, this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but maybe popular charities should keep this in mind before accepting money in a context like this.
I'm sorry, but didn't Google pioneer the image recognition models years ago that Inaturalist uses to help users identify plants and animals? Google can suck it, but perhaps ai has proven it has a place in these applications?
- Pattern recognition and “generative” ai are 2 completely different things. One is helpful tool with limited capabilities , the other is an overhyped markov chain that uses humongous amounts of energy and steals humans’ creative works.
  
  It is my understanding that the advances in classifier models were and are inexorably linked to generative models. Wasn't Deepdream a fairly crude inversion of existing classifier models?
- Lying machines have no place in anything involving facts or knowledge. Get the fuck out.
  
  this is the one we banned a few days ago coming in from another server
  and even if it isn't hoo boy that posting record

16 comments