There's a weird level of brain rot going on with AI. My wife recently had some troubles trying to research who owned our home in the past (it was built in the 1880s); she posted to a local forum asking for some specific information about who & where they were buried and so on and was getting replies from somebody that were seemingly plausible but just had no basis in reality when she looked into it further. After pressing him several times for his sources the guy finally admitted it was ChatGPT.

Just... why the fuck? Why would anybody do that? They wasted not only my wife's time but their own as well, they contributed nothing useful (and if anything, their "contribution" was purely negative).

It's baffling behavior.

Outright hoaxes remain rare and are often easy to spot, said Lees – nobody is falling for a toucan sighting in Siberia – but he says birders often use AI to edit and improve an image, and the algorithm can then introduce parts from different bird species to create the new image.

My phone offers an "AI enhance" option after you take a photo. Mostly it tweaks the framing and colours, but it can also do some surprising things and produce a quite different image from the original. I played with it a bit when I first got the phone, and I saw it change people's eye colour, turn their head to face a different way, and add extra strings to musical instruments. So I don't use it, but it sounds like the problem is mostly people using AI image enhancers like that carelessly.

But everyone must think I've seen the rare Chicken-footed Cock-warbler or they won't think I'm cool!

Idiots who want to generate nanoseconds' worth of free fleeting internet clout, I suppose. And here's me who can't even be bothered to edit my bird photos before posting them.

It's so ridiculous and unnecessary too. I've gone out and identified such beautiful birds, nature in general is so varied yet very often vibrant. It's a hobby that really does not need any alteration to what you see: birds are very pretty!

Birders can be weird. Some can get very competitive, not surprised some would make fake images to pretend they saw some rare bird in an area they aren't normally seem or something.

Pathological liars feel the need to lie and decieve unnecessarily and pointlessly at every twist and turn. AI is their new bread and butter. Ask them why they act the way they do, and they probably can't even tell you.

Like marathons there is an entire population of people who 'cheat' in something that has no real consequence except to talk themselves up.

The very popular app ebird has leaderboards, that alone pushes lying and exaggeration. Obviously I am not saying everyone is cheating, just that some are. I would personally bin such fripperies.

Feedback loops on more general wildlife social media also pushes a very different expectation of what is a good photograph and what is a hard bird to photograph/find.

If you chasing clout from that audience then its putting ever more pressure on to get ever closer, higher framed shots of the most photogenic birds, AI (re)generation to chase that becomes inevitable for those without morals

Reminds me of people making up stuff on fully anonymous image boards like 4chan just to get some replies. Pathetic.

The internet peaked over a decade ago when bandwidth was alright for what we consumed and attention seekers have only infested mainstream media. You could navigate around them. Most forums have died since the early 2010s and you have to deal with these faking clowns even in the tidiest niches that we have left. People have become completely obsessed with attention and money. It‘s all the internet is good for anymore. At least if you ask most users.

This was a whole thing with Samsung phones replacing the moon with a fake one in their telephoto images... I hate how much processing is going into phone images now.

vomits

The “failure mode” of AI editing is different though.

Humans (I guess) might mislabel something or take a bad shot. If they try to touch it up “traditionally” they could mess up the coloration at most.

But with AI editing, now you have to watch out for fine details you’d normally use for identification being completely, convincingly fabricated, as the article points out, with altruistic intent from the user (who’s just trying to submit data that looks alright)

The solution is global AI literacy; but that’s not going so well.

I'd argue that AI does change things:

• on one hand it increases the percentage of invalid/unusable images. A mis-labeled image is still potentially useful, an image of a toucan in the Arctic isn't. This means that even large datasets become largely unusable because of the volume of fake images.
• on the other hand any AI picture that slips through, taints the dataset and results in expensive manual cleanup to ensure data is reliable.

I can somehow relate to the issue. I am NOT a photographer, I can’t even adjust focus on non-phone cameras for a family picture. But when I made the yearly family photo calendar, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom had easily accessible functions to make the calendar pop more (five to ten years ago). Now, I can see the attraction to ”clarifying” tools, but just as any other applications in society, we need to view this more critically and not just be amazed by how much more AI slop makes our work pop . We will always be amazed by something that seems like unreal or surreal.

I naively never realised how this would expand to research beyond our shallow social media.