TechTakes

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!