It’s great! But let’s make the AI optional.
Edit: Thank you for your help, I truly appreciate you taking the time to explain it to me.
Response from developer
Thank you for your feedback. iNaturalist does not use generative AI like a large language model to provide ID suggestions. If you're thinking of something like Gemini, ChatGPT, etc, what iNat does is very different and much much smaller. We've used the basic same approach since we added computer vision ID suggestions in 2017, and our computer vision model is trained on a few machines we control, not in a large data center. In the case of this app, the model that provides live ID suggestions is in the app and on your device, and the in-camera suggestions all happen on the device, using very little electricity. Even sending photos to our model on our servers is quite different than prompting a large language model. In Advanced Mode in the app you can set up the app to not use computer vision suggestions by default.
Super useful
Great! Some Suggestions
The app feels a little bit clunky sometimes as well. There needs to be a search function for other users in-app.
Overall great.
My favorite app!
INaturalist now says mushrooms are paw paws
What model is INaturalist using? Any disclosure here?
The dev replies saying “we’ve always used machine learning is really really poor argument for the slop AI you are using NOW. It has gotten so terrible. The UI is a nightmare & there IS NOT a way to switch to the older amazing version of iNat in the settings as the devs state here. Constant overload of email notifications, but when you open the app you don’t see ANY of them. What have you done to this app? Is this what the big google money brought to iNat? & you ask for donations?!? Fix this app first. Once loved iNat when it was reliable & useful, it is not anymore. Notice the dev reply, they don’t answer questions
