this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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This comic is so old, that both should be rather easy now
TBF it had been a long standing problem for roughly a half century before this. Specifically birds were the thing researchers tried to identify first, which is probably the reference here.
She did get her research team after all :)
Now try to identify if it's a fish
Oof
Fish? You mean a water bird?
There's no such thing called fish.
- Stephen Jay Gould (Biologist)
Or, there's fish and we are one, or there's fish and a hagfish, dogfish or lungfish isn't one.
I guess we could return to medieval and say it's based on shape not taxonomy, too, so whales would be fish.
🐬
Oh, yeah, the specific example listed was solved within roughly a month of the comic being posted. But the idea still applies, as seen with the twitter post above.
Well, sure, with an image classifier, the bird identification is doable. I'm sure I could implement that if I went looking for some open source thingamabob that does that. But it's still not something I could actually understand. That part definitely hasn't changed over the years.
Ebird/ Merlin bird id does this wonderfully.
Having taken an ML class, with some of my college notes I could do this and "understand" it... but the weights would still be a black box. AI training is black (box) magic.
only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.
It took almost exactly 5 years from publication for that to be commonplace.
Can't wait for the Disney live action movie remake of XKDC comics!
Plot twist: it will be written and created by AI:-(.
It will feature all sorts of jokes about using qwerty and windows
And Linux, if the Fediverse had any say about the matter! (Or xkcd either:-D)