Michigan researchers use AI chatbots to mine eBird and iNaturalist comments for ecology

University of Michigan-led researchers used the large language models Claude and ChatGPT to find and classify interactions between species described in user comments on the citizen-science platforms eBird and iNaturalist, in a proof-of-concept study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the university said Oct. 12. The two case studies covered interactions among Michigan birds and between the West Coast lady butterfly and the plants it visits, and found evidence of non-native plant species moving into West Coast ecosystems that might otherwise have been missed. In one test, Claude classified a random sample of nearly 500 eBird comments in six minutes, a task that took an undergraduate researcher eight hours, the university said.