AI and Flyfishing

RCF

RCF

Legend
Forum Supporter
I read this article and it invoked a lot of feelings and thoughts:

www.cnbc.com

Bill Gates warns ‘there is no plan’ for the ‘upheaval’ AI will cause

Bill Gates warned governments are not adequately preparing for how AI could displace workers, strain social systems and create global risks.
www.cnbc.com www.cnbc.com

I felt the article clearly communicated the issues/challenges so the message could be clearly understood by almost any person.

Some Background: Bill Gates has for the longest time argued against government intervention/oversight and that AI was great. For him to do an 180 degree about face and become an 'alarmist' (that is not his style) caught my attention. He obviously knows more than we will ever know. I am just glad he made his thoughts known. Our news media (at least what I view/watch/read and listen to daily) is not giving it much attention - shame on them.

I began to wonder how AI could affect our small world of fly fishing:

Will AI replace:

Recommendations for which fly rods to use in specific uses?
Identify which lines to use that match a fly rod?
Which flies to use at a particular location?
Identify our protected/private locations to fish?
Replace our SBS of fellow fly tyers?

Will fishing blogs become the norm for AI postings?

Will AI replace our local brick 'n mortar local shops and their local expertise?

I believe the answer is Yes to all the above. It already does a lot of that using Reddit was a major source of data.

Is there a way to protect information on PNWFF from AI stealing our member's information and expertise/advice/trip reports? I sure hope so...

We need to keep PNWFF our small community of many trusted subject matter experts and info on this site the valuable source it is...
 
AI will be integrated into fish finder devices and more fish will be taken. I believe fish finders are not something that fly fishers should use, but that is just my snob opinion so the AI will make it worse
 
RCF said:
Is there a way to protect information on PNWFF from AI stealing our member's information and expertise/advice/trip reports?
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Web crawlers and scrapers harvest every single post on the forum...every picture also. Look at the 'Guests' list of visitors and multiple AI companies are almost always present.

There a bunch of free web scraping tools out there that allow anyone to harvest the content, this has been going on for a while now.

Far too late...
 
Mossback said:
Web crawlers and scrapers harvest every single post on the forum...every picture also. Look at the 'Guests' list of visitors and multiple AI companies are almost always present.

There a bunch of free web scraping tools out there that allow anyone to harvest the content, this has been going on for a while now.

Far too late...
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Sad but true. Forums like this work because the information on them is publicly available. People read it, and some small proportion of them are motivated to become members and contribute. The majority of the readers are not contributing, and simply consuming what others contribute. The scrapers and AI companies are just a further manifestation for this, harvesting others work for their own gain.

The temptation, of course, is to put it all behind a paywall, but that wouldn’t work. If the information was kept private, then there would be no new contributors, and the forum would wither away and die.

Everybody knows this - so there is seldom anything particularly insightful posted on public forums these days. You’d be hard pressed to actually build a good portfolio of fishing spots based on PNWFF posts, which is exactly as it should be. Equally, many or even most of the replies to a question about “what rod/line/fly to use/match/etc” are made by people who are pretty new to fly fishing and don’t fully understand the nuances of what they are talking about so their information is of dubious use.

As for AI, all that LLM’s do is harvest information and spit digests of it out again. They can’t evaluate the quality of the inputs. So if the question is really basic, and the answer is obvious, it works. If it’s not, and most of what’s written is garbage, then the answers are garbage. But then again, maybe garbage is what the average fly fisher wants…
 
It's been the case since inception of the web, that anything you put out there, be it a search on Google, or a post on a forum or any other social media or app etc. is harvested by a search engine, and sold as data to advertisers.
Now AI uses it to train LLM...

This will obviously end well...
😁
 
I query Reddit forums with product questioning...so I'll Google "Reddit forum, most durable porch stain in snow zone"..and AI will summarize the Reddit group findings above the actual forum threads...so very helpful when looking for info and not wanting to parse through threads.

So waiting for the first coat of porch stain to dry I just Googled "PNW fly fishing forum favorite fly rod" and the response was"
On the PNW Fly Fishing forum, members express mixed opinions on a single "favorite" rod, though a 9-foot 5-weight or 6-weight (such as classic Sage models like the RPL or LL series, or G.Loomis) is widely considered the ultimate all-around favorite for regional trout
 
I checked AI to see if I was a troll...
Turns out I'm not.

No, Mossback is not an internet troll; he is a highly active, respected, and long-standing member of the PNW Fly Fishing community board.

Dry and satirical humor: His forum signature playfully reads, "I prefer bumper sticker length statements that contain no facts, perspective, or historical context, but yet fit my personal prejudices and fuel my grievances." While his tone is heavily sarcastic and witty, he is a dedicated "Forum Supporter" who regularly shares actual fishing reports, helps beginners, and even wins fly-tying contests on the board.

AI can make mistakes though....
🤣🤣😁🤣🤣


Just a quick search with an AI generated summary yielded that.
 
SurfnFish said:
I query Reddit forums with product questioning...so I'll Google "Reddit forum, most durable porch stain in snow zone"..and AI will summarize the Reddit group findings above the actual forum threads...so very helpful when looking for info and not wanting to parse through threads.

So waiting for the first coat of porch stain to dry I just Googled "PNW fly fishing forum favorite fly rod" and the response was"
On the PNW Fly Fishing forum, members express mixed opinions on a single "favorite" rod, though a 9-foot 5-weight or 6-weight (such as classic Sage models like the RPL or LL series, or G.Loomis) is widely considered the ultimate all-around favorite for regional trout
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Not the Redington CT rod?
 
RCF said:
We are sorta doing that on the trip reports by disguising the name of the water that is being fished.
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All well and good, but also consider the pics you post. They can be fed to AI and locations identified. If anyone else posted a similar pic and the approx location identified then your honey hole has been outed.
 
Sir Homey said:
All well and good, but also consider the pics you post. They can be fed to AI and locations identified. If anyone else posted a similar pic and the approx location identified then your honey hole has been outed.
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Just doing a Google image search on many of the pictures with enough background will often identify the body of water, especially the lakes.

Don't ask me how I know...
 
Sir Homey said:
All well and good, but also consider the pics you post. They can be fed to AI and locations identified. If anyone else posted a similar pic and the approx location identified then your honey hole has been outed.
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Maybe only allow members to see Trip Reports?
 
Mossback said:
Just doing a Google image search on many of the pictures with enough background will often identify the body of water, especially the lakes.
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Definitely. Any photo of a high like with the skyline and/or waterline combined with little pieces of information like type/size of trout and 90%+ I will figure it out. I haven't really used AI to identify lakes, but I'm sure that will make it easier. Avoiding the use of lake names or using alternate names should help to an extent.
 
Sir Homey said:
All well and good, but also consider the pics you post. They can be fed to AI and locations identified. If anyone else posted a similar pic and the approx location identified then your honey hole has been outed.
Click to expand...
I have spent an ungodly number of hours trying to do get AI to match up location to a photo - it's not there yet. Maybe someday, but it's currently out of it's range of capabilities.

It can look up reports on forums, including this one - so if you name a place, it becomes a part of the AI data set.
 
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