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Introduction Technologies that allow computers and machines to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence are often referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies allow machines to complete tasks with traits or capabilities ordinarily associated with human cognition, such as reasoning, problem solving, common-sense knowledge management, planning, learning, translation, perception, vision, speech recognition, and social intelligence (Kaplan and Haenlein 2019). Research in AI is rapidly increasing, as indicated when c omparing the annual publishing rate of papers focused on AI between 1996 and 2017 against the publishing rates of papers focused on any topic or against the publishing rates of papers in the field of computer science (see the growth of annually published papers by topic in Shoham et al. [2018; p. 9]). This growth in AI publications has prompted researchers to critically explore the potential promises and risks of AI (Scherer 2016; Webb 2019; Yudkowsky 2008) as well as ethics and responsibilities (Miller 2019; Cowls and Floridi 2018; Scherer 2016; Dawson et al. 2019). AI has been used in citizen science projects for about 20 years. It was first used in this context in 2000, in collaborative AI databases such as the Generic Artificial Consciousness (GAC)/Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project (McKinstry 2009) and the Open Mind Common Sense project (Singh et al. 2002). In these models, usersubmitted propositions were meant to create a database of common-sense knowledge that could function as a kind of digital brain. This relationship between collective knowledge and algorithmic processing evolved in many directions and, in 2019, is predominantly represented by machine learning, especially applied to computer vision, which includes diverse methods of automatically identifying objects from digital photographs. For example, the iNaturalist platform, a citizen science project and online social network, is designed to enable citizen scientists and ecologists alike to upload observations from the natural world, such as images of animals and plants (Van Horn et al. 2018). The platform is one among many (Wäldchen et al. 2018) that include an automated

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