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Comment by phito | Hacker News Reader

Right. This kind of thing is only going to work on very common plants that are easy to ID. I am very into carnivorous plants and even us experts sometimes have trouble identifying plants, often you need very specific morphological details to ID species that a phone picture will never be able to catch.

IMO this will just lead people to wrongly ID their plants more often than not, and that's a really bad thing.

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The iNaturalist app does a spectacular job at identifying plants (and insects, fish, birds…), even disambiguating based on your location

You label geotagged images with the AIs suggestion if you agree with it and then other users can either confirm or suggest a different / more specific species.

You got me curious, so I tried that app, and I'm getting "Unknown species" for every single one of my plants... I guess no identification is better than bad identification.

It is an important feature. For plants, users will immediately see that the answer is wrong but for many other things (identifying suspects automatically) it might not be as obvious.

As a bonus if the algorithm can tell it can't identify correctly you can use this feedback to teach the algorithm.

A great example of this is the Akinator app. The developers built up a database of answers by getting the users to fill in the missing data, which produced more accurate results and subsequently attracted more users. That feedback loop for apps like this seems like a very effective model. What I find interesting about this is that the value of the product, from a business perspective, comes from the success of the software in enabling that feedback loop, while from the user’s perspective, the value is in the data. But the data is emergent from the feedback algorithm.

Is it perhaps also a difference in intended use? If iNaturalist is for wildlife and uses location heavily, eg identifying tropical houseplants indoors in a different region might not work.

Could be, I just set location data on it with the original location of the plants, but it still cannot ID them. Granted, they are not very common species.

The GPS helps with a “seen nearby” weight, but it shouldn’t exclude anything. Could be a factor of photography, with some plants it’s easier to get a nice canonical leaf shape than others. Taking a wide angle of a potted plant such that the whole plant is in frame might not provide enough detail, so there’s a learning curve in knowing how to photography for the algorithms benefit, kind of like learning how to phrase search queries for better Google results

Are they garden plants?

No, they're carnivorous plants grown in greenhouse.

Perhaps they are unknown species! Hah, well, sorry my recommendation didn’t come through, I can imagine it performs better on common plants everyone takes pictures of, which is what I’m identifying when I walk around town.

Still, if you post the plants under a more general species other users can identify it mentally, adding to the data set.

You need to click on the "Unknown Species" box in order to get a list of suggestions. Probably not the most intuitive, but it avoids auto-assigning IDs without prior review.

I've used PictureThis a great deal to identify both wild and garden flowers. I've found it really good for the 95% most common plants and also for getting you in the right ballpark so you can then look things up more easily in a field guide. I've just accepted that there are some species that it can't distinguish between - often you need to know exactly the right feature to look at of the plant to differentiate species. It'd be useful though if it flagged this a bit better. Umbellifers are a classic example. It gets them correct more often than not, but I think it'd be good for it to indicate that uncertainty better.

Not sure if this will put your mind at ease or not. But I really like learning plants, I hike a lot and usually the only book I bring is a plant ID book. But I'm not good at knowing where to start looking in the book. I find apps like this (I use Seek) incredibly helpful, I don't just assume the app is correct but it gives me a place to start looking in the book. That said, I also don't assume I'm correct when I find what I think it is in the book. Anyway just wanted to say I find plant I'd apps a helpful learning tool.

I will say though, most of the time I don't have service where I'm IDing plants, so it's not the most convenient tool.

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