Machine generated observations, identifications and comments
We made iNaturalist for humans. When machines masquerade as humans and make content on iNat, bad things happen because our software and our community simply were not made to accommodate the speed, volume, and other characteristics of machine-generated content.
Thus, our intent is that observations, identifications, and comments are manually generated by individual human choices. To achieve this, we've made posting machine generated content a suspendable offense. It’s ok for humans to use machines as tools for arriving at their choice or to facilitate posting this content, as long as there is human involvement/oversight creating the content/decisions about each individual observation, identification, or comment.
Examples of prohibited behavior (non-exhaustive):
Machine generated observations would include observations posted from automated systems such as camera traps posted with no human moderation/oversight in the process.
Machine generated identifications would include identifications generated from machine learning algorithms or a generic data source with no human moderation/oversight.
Machine generated comments would include a generic comment posted via a script.
Examples of acceptable behavior (non-exhaustive):
Writing a script to create observations from a manually curated local folder of your images and metadata on your desktop
Manually curating a selection of photos from a camera trap and uploading them as observations
Using machine learning tools to help arrive at an identification that you manually post
Creating a third-party app that enables a real person/people to create content
We recognize that it can be difficult to distinguish human from machine generated activity. If you believe your account has been mistakenly suspended please contact help@inaturalist.org.
loarie
