Experts warn increase in enhanced photos on birding platforms creating fake sightings, threatening credibility of tool used by scientists

For many birdwatchers, recording a species outside its normal range is the holy grail. In the UK, the discoveries often make national headlines. The western reef heron, for example, usually found in Africa and southern Europe, was spotted in a seaside town in north Wales in June, and widely celebrated on birding forums.

But a new scourge is threatening to disrupt the fun: AI slop.

Scientists are appealing to birders to limit their use of AI when editing images over fears that it could undermine the credibility of popular citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist and Macaulay Library, which are routinely used in scientific research to monitor species’ habitat range.

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Lees points to the example of a false sighting of a red-winged blackbird in central Brazil, which is usually found in North America and had never been seen in this area of Brazil until the reported sighting. The bird was, in fact, an epaulet oriole – a common new world bird species – but the photographer had asked an AI platform to make the picture “look better”, which is when parts of the red-winged blackbird were added, resulting in the false sighting.

researchers warned that hundreds of fake images have already been discovered on popular databases for recording species. They said that the true scale of the issue is unknown – as many could go undetected – and could contaminate records collected by the public.

Biological recording citizen-science platforms receive millions of images, sounds and video; these data increasingly underpin our knowledge about where species occur in space and time and how they behave. However, their utility may be compromised if databases become appreciably contaminated by media produced by generative text-to-image machine-learning models, and potentially lead to spurious ecological inferences.

Humanity's knowledge is being destroyed. Guard your pre-2020 datasets I guess.