AI-Edited Bird Photos Threaten Scientific Research, Scientists Warn

Scientists have warned that AI-enhanced wildlife photographs, increasingly shared on citizen science platforms like iNaturalist and the Macaulay Library, could undermine the reliability of bird research. A commentary in the journal Nature, cited by The Guardian, reports that hundreds of fake images have already been detected on species-recording databases, though the full scale remains unknown. Dr. Alexander Lees, an ecologist at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of the article, highlighted a case where a photographer used AI to improve an image of an epaulet oriole in central Brazil, inadvertently adding features of a red-winged blackbird—a species never recorded there—creating a false record. Lees noted that many wildlife photographers are "obsessed with getting a beautiful photo" but risk altering crucial details. He observed that a huge volume of wildlife photos on Facebook are now AI-generated, complicating efforts to track species distributions. On iNaturalist, only 1,400 of over 610 million images have been flagged for AI use, indicating the challenge of detection.