A rare bird appeared in Brazil. AI had put it there.
A rare bird turned up in central Brazil, or so it seemed. A photo on the wildlife platform iNaturalist showed a red-winged blackbird. That North American species had never turned up in that part of Brazil. It would have been a notable first.
It was not real. The bird in the original photo was an epaulet oriole, a common local species. The photographer had asked an AI tool to make the image “look better.” The software helpfully added features from a different bird.
The problem with ‘look better’
That case sits at the heart of a warning from researchers, published as a commentary in Nature Ecology & Evolution. They say generative AI is starting to pollute citizen-science records. Those crowd-sourced sightings tell scientists where species live and how they move.
There are two ways it happens. The rarer one is outright fakes, images generated from scratch and passed off...
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