Bribing people to use AI should be a giant red flag that clearly indicates this shit is a bubble.
I hope you are right
I’ve been reading up on the dotcom bubble and all the red flags are there.
It’s not that hard to throw up a website that allows user uploads. The community can replace iN in a heartbeat. They bought into their brand as the important thing, and not the contributors, and now they’re probably going to slowly waste away.
Making a new thing is easy, filling up the database takes significantly more work, tho
Has anyone else noticed their identification app, Seek, has dramatically worsened in identification ability? Not recently, more like over the last I wanna say year or so.
I’ve noticed the opposite with Seek. It’s way better now, especially with insects and fungi.
Oh interestingggg… I can only tell it’s messing up with plants, since plants are what I know. I’ve just been mostly taking it at it’s word for insects/fungi/etc, good to hear that’s been working out!
Could the problem be area specific? My initial thought was, if people are submitting lots of erroneous IDs near me, maybe it’s messing up the data?
Plants, depending on the year, are really hard to identify even with a trained eye. If an AI algorithm is training on, say, only the blooming season versions of a plant, then it will do a poor job of identifying the plant in the Fall. Same for human submissions, usually they are photographed when they are in bloom.
I teach an environmental science course and we have a lab where I have students use iNaturalist for plant identification but the Fall semester students are always at a disadvantage, we have to crack open the dying plants for identification.
I’ve been comparing its results to plantnet, same time of year, same exact pictures even, and Seek is getting wrecked in comparison. That said I don’t have any idea how either app even works.
Will nothing be spared from the AI-pocalypse? I made nearly 100 observations for them over the past 2 years.
Guess I get to look somewhere else to help out now.Been using Obsidentify for a while, seems like a worthy alternative.
