NatureSpot data has been mined by all the major AI players, ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. Is this good or bad? More...

Unlike many, personally I'm neutral on artificial Intelligence (AI). It's a tool, no more good or bad than a hammer - depends how it's used - detecting cancer or nudify deepfakes. There's no point in burying your head in the sand, it's here and it's not going away. What I have been finding useful are the "deep thinking" modes the companies have rolled out over the past months. These modes claim to break down the task into multiple steps, improve the logic of the output over "fast" chat-style modes by self-checking and correcting, and introduce "transparency" by linking to sources so that users can check the output for themselves. Do these modes produce flawless output which is 100% correct? Of course not, any more than a human writer does. What is striking is the speed at which they are improving. 

Which brings us to "transparency". AI sycophancy is a noted problem - the tendency of artificial intelligence models to excessively agree with or flatter users in order to gain their approval. But this is not new. Years ago the idea of "ground truth" in search results was abandoned. Google, followed by the other search engines, rolled out "personalized" search results which used browsing history to shape the output. Different people saw different results from the same search term. So when all (and I do mean all) the AI "deep thinking" models show me links to NatureSpot pages in their output (in addition to other sites), are they just trying to flatter me, or do we have some of the best content online (for the nerdy nature questions I tend to ask - I don't get NatureSpot links back when I ask AI how to win the lottery). And more importantly - does it matter? 

One of the knock-on consequences of the rise of AI is a fall-off in direct Google search traffic to websites. Reduced web traffic is bad if you're trying to sell advertising on your website, but maybe it's good if it takes the load off the struggling NatureSpot servers and our core message - to Discover, Identify, Record - is getting out there anyway. We've never made any money from Google or Microsoft, so what do we care if people learn about nature from the content we publish by a different route? 

This is just my personal opinion. What do you think?