Bugsy – Insect Collection

I saw this on Reddit and decided to check it out. A lot of people rejected the app outright because of its AI usage, but I’m neutral to AI so I wanted to give it a shot. I like the concept. Collect bugs, take their quizzes, get points to unlock new bugs. I enjoy that there is no “streak pressure” as the developer puts it, so I don’t have to log in daily. However, I have no interest in paying for a subscription! Maybe I might would spring a few dollars towards extra features once or twice a year, but monthly? No. I also had to dig into the terms of service to find out what kind of LLM is being used for the premium bug chat feature. It’s Google Gemini. I don’t really know enough about Gemini to comment, but while I don’t think the existence of this completely optional feature is any more destructive to the environment than a regular Google search, I still have concerns about the LLM inadvertently giving out false information. I think the idea of being able to chat with little bug friends is very cute, but maybe it would be better to do it a bit differently. I feel like having a more restricted chat with pre-written answers would be safer, but I understand that would be a lot of work too, even if you had an LLM generate them for you and you just fact-checked it before writing it into the app. Still, it’s something to think about, especially if you’re not getting many people to pay for the subscription service.