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I have stared at a Blue Jay mimicking while Merlin repeatedly labeled it Red-Shouldered Hawk. I’ve seen it pop up a bunch of suspicious one-offs around a mockingbird as well (same with Gray Catbird, another mimic).

But I agree with you that it gets those things correct most of the time and it also seems to be improving over time.

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Seek by iNaturalist has the same problem: if you wiggle your camera around enough, it will give you a species identification. But that species identification will be spurious. It's not reliable at all.

Pointing this out on HN has sometimes resulted in a lot of upvotes and sometimes in a lot of downvotes. I don't know why. In all cases, Seek identifications are unlikely to be correct.

(I also got one response saying I was wrong to try to tar iNaturalist by association with the unaffiliated app "Seek by iNaturalist". As the name of the app suggests, they are not in fact unaffiliated.)

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