ztar-hunter428

[ztar-hunter428]

utilizing your soul as a stress toy. not with intent to harm you but if you are harmed dont worry im just using your soul as a stress toy.

is this what the plot of delta rune is iive never played it

[ztar-hunter428]

I think some of you forgot that autistic people sometimes act strange and say things that are poorly worded and speak with incorrect tone and misunderstand or miss social cues because they are autistic

[ztar-hunter428]

I hate community posts so much.

Fuck you mean the funniest shit I've ever seen is locked behind a reinforced glass wall and I can't reblog it.

[ztar-hunter428]

THE ENTIRE WEST IS BEING PUT UP FOR SALE AND I AM BEGGING YOU TO CALL YOUR SENATORS

Trump’s budget bill has many, many things in it, but buried amongst it is the MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PUBLIC LAND FOR SALE.

This is the entirety of the Arizona state forests, the entire Cascades mountain range. Swathes of pristine desert around the national parks in Utah. On the doorstep of Jackson Hole.

THIS BILL IS BIG, BUT IT CAN BE AMENDED AND ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT PASS AS IS please.

If you have ever enjoyed the wilderness, we stand to lose it all forever.

CALLING your senators - NOT JUST IN THE WEST. ALL SENATORS, is CRUCIAL.

Outdoor alliance has a great resource for reaching out.

I don’t have a huge following but please, everywhere I have ever loved, the forests I grew up playing in, the land I got married on, is all at risk and I am begging.

[ztar-hunter428]

you remind me of a tumblr user

uh oh

[ztar-hunter428]

Oooo scary

Oooo GET OFF MY BLOG IF THIS MAKES YOU UNCOMFORTABLE PLEASE

[ztar-hunter428]

not everything is about you

I miss my wife

[ztar-hunter428]

Okay I found this and no this is not like me at all

you remind me of tumblr user fujoshiarmageddon

who

[ztar-hunter428]

what does that mean

What kind of freak am i

you wont like the answer to that

[ztar-hunter428]

I miss my plastic spoon, my calculator, my yard stick, my metal pipe, my tissue box, my green worm, my yellow sludge

I need a new item to cling to

[ztar-hunter428]

I need a new item to cling to

[ztar-hunter428]

what arw your thoughts on the Monsters

Which ones

[ztar-hunter428]

at the insane stage of character obsession where i start getting the urge to post pngs of them every five seconds like im showing ppl a picture of my stupid ass boyfriend that nobody likes but me

[ztar-hunter428]

aside from any ethical or political discussion, the use of generative AI in amateur projects really sucks to me. I think video games where you can tell all the voice acting was done by one of the developers buddies is great. I love when indie album art was painted by someone who doesn't really know how to paint. I really believe that there's a lot of value in amateur projects where it's clear the people making it didn't have a lot of resources.

If you use AI in projects then it'll be distracting, and if you do everything yourself you'll fall short, and it'll still be distracting, but instead of being frustrating or just plain cheap it'll be endearing.

that's not to mention that using generative AI usually garners a lot of ill will, especially in indie spaces.

[ztar-hunter428]

Not certain if this has already been posted about here, but iNaturalist recently uploaded a blog post stating that they had received a grant from Google to incorporate new forms of generative AI into their 'computer vision' model.

I'm sure I don't need to tell most of you why this is a horrible idea, that does away with much of the trust gained by the thus far great service that is iNaturalist. But, to elaborate on my point, to collaborate with Google on tools such as these is a slap in the face to much of the userbase, including a multitude of biological experts and conservationists across the globe.

They claim that they will work hard to make sure that the identification information provided by the AI tools is of the highest quality, which I do not entirely doubt from this team. I would hope that there is a thorough vetting process in place for this information (Though, if you need people to vet the information, what's the point of the generative AI over a simple wiki of identification criteria). Nonetheless, if you've seen Google's (or any other tech company's) work in this field in the past, which you likely have, you will know that these tools are not ready to explain the nuances of species identification, as they continue to provide heavy amounts of complete misinformation on a daily basis. Users may be able to provide feedback, but should a casual user look to the AI for an explanation, many would not realize if what they are being told is wrong.

Furthermore, while the data is not entirely my concern, as the service has been using our data for years to train its 'computer vision' model into what it is today, and they claim to have ways to credit people in place, it does make it quite concerning that Google is involved in this deal. I can't say for certain that they will do anything more with the data given, but Google has proven time and again to be highly untrustworthy as a company.

Though, that is something I'm less concerned by than I am by the fact that a non-profit so dedicated to the biodiversity of the earth and the naturalists on it would even dare lock in a deal of this nature. Not only making a deal to create yet another shoehorned misinformation machine, that which has been proven to use more unclean energy and water (among other things) than it's worth for each unsatisfactory and untrustworthy search answer, but doing so with one of the greediest companies on the face of the earth, a beacon of smog shining in colors antithetical to the iNaturalist mission statement. It's a disgrace.

In conclusion, I want to believe in the good of iNaturalist. The point stands, though, that to do this is a step in the worst possible direction. Especially when they, for all intents and purposes, already had a system that works! With their 'computer vision' model providing basic suggestions (if not always accurate in and of itself), and user suggested IDs providing further details and corrections where needed.

If you're an iNaturalist user who stands in opposition to this decision, leave a comment on this blog post, and maybe we can get this overturned.

[Note: Yes, I am aware there is good AI used in science, this is generative AI, which is a different thing entirely. Also, if you come onto this post with strawmen or irrelevant edge-cases I will wring your neck.]

[ztar-hunter428]

Is iNaturalist collaborating with google to put AI in our favorite bug site????

There is an important post over on Mastodon about this, but I wanted to pass this along to the bug fans on tumblr too. It sounds like they want to use AI to "improve" species suggestions, but is also sounds like google is trying to datamine iNaturalist.

Everyone is a little alarmed by this for OBVIOUS reasons. AI has made learning about insects online so much more awful and iNaturalist is an island of sanity in a sea of slop. I don't want that to change at all.

iNaturalist has said they will make a "blog post" to explain due to the concerns this has raised. And they should. This isn't the community that wants this kind of change.

I hope that they will be reasonable and the alarm is just overblown, but I do think it's justified.

When you search for "ants" on google you get nonsense like this labeled as a macrophoto:

There is NO ANT with mouthparts like that. This is made up. It makes learning about bugs harder and I hate the haphazard and chaotic way this tech has ruined so many sources. So, it should be treated with extreme caution as far as I'm concerned. Even if we are just talking about "suggestions for species ID" this isn't something I really think we need.

[ztar-hunter428]

Love to see iNaturalist betraying the goodwill of thousands of volunteers that help identify peoples' observations in exchange for a grant from Google's AI slop department!

Love how the FAQ says that iNaturalist has already been using "a type of AI" to help offer identifications for photos, as if that's even remotely similar to using a fucking LLM to try and give accurate species identification "tips".

Because that sounds like an amazing idea, especially since the experts on this site spend their entire lives studying certain taxa to differentiate between species. Let's act like these volunteers WOULDN'T want to write these tips, like they haven't been asking for a user-run wiki for years. I think instead we should just use their time to train our model. Which, by the way, doesn't fucking care if the "tips" its giving are even accurate, no matter how much training you give it.

And I won't even get into the other ethical concerns of all of this.

We're truly deeply rooted in an age of misinformation and disinformation. We need to advocate for better and more accessible science communication now, more than ever. If you use iNaturalist at all, you NEED to speak up about this.