I've posted before here about how I enjoy watching deep sea exploration livestreams, and that's still something I do a lot in my spare time while playing games that allow me to focus on something else while I do so. Now though I've got a new way to make my brain go brrrrr with deep sea critters! The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has just released an app/game called "FathomVerse", which serves the dual purpose of being a fun way to learn about and identify deep sea life, from fish to corals to crabs to sea urchins and everything in between, while also helping out the scientific community by training AI (the good kind, if such a thing can exist lmao) to identify deep sea organisms from images.

Why is it good that AI should do this, and why isn't it just another example of AI taking human jobs? Well, imagine you do a 10 hour long deep sea exploration dive using a Remotely Operated Vehicle. You're recording high definition video the whole time, sometimes from multiple cameras, and if it's in an area with abundant life, you might be passing by dozens or hundreds of individual organisms every few minutes.

Until recently, those dive recordings had to be annotated solely by humans. By people sitting and slowly watching through every moment of the dives, pausing the video repeatedly as they write down each individual organism on the screen at any given moment. Not only is this HUGELY costly in terms of person-hours involved, it's not the 'end result'. It's just a step that has to be taken so that the species data gathered can then be used for different sorts of scientific analysis. In other words, it would be better for everyone, including and perhaps especially the scientists who are working with the data, for it to be something they could leave to AI to do, with humans then able to focus on the analysis after the fact with more time and resources remaining to them.

Of course if you're of the opinion that no-one should be giving up their time for free and that you don't want to train any AI, not even one that has genuinely useful applications and doesn't steal from independent creators (all the biological images used within the game are from scientific organisations who opted into the program and agreed to have their dive footage used, so it's nothing like the kind of AI that goes around generating weird-handed furry art by stealing other artists' work), without compensation, I totally get that. Valid and fair, haha. Buuuut if you think you'd find it fun, I'd recommend looking up FathomVerse on the app store/google play. I've spent a couple of hours playing it today and I really like it. It makes the Pokemon Go part of my brain go brrrrr. :3

Check it out, and maybe your brain will go brrrrr too. :D