Can AI Ruin Something as Innocent as Birdwatching?

On the off chance that you’re one of those rare people who starts a new week with a flush of optimism and goodwill toward all mankind, instead of a craving for caffeine and the last vestiges of a hangover, let me put things right. You may, for instance, find your early-week optimism extending to AI. On reflection, maybe things aren’t that bad. Perhaps there are things that AI can’t ruin after all. Surely something like… oh, I don’t know, the innocent, serene pastime of birdwatching is immune to the depredations of AI slop? Nope. NOPE. As proof, behold a letter entitled, “Citizen science platforms must mitigate against the threat of generative AI,” published recently by the venerable journal Nature. The letter is from a group of scientists based variously at Cornell and Manchester Metropolitan University, and it discusses how a flood of AI-generated or enhanced images is undermining the utility of citizen science. The scientists point out that while “[the utility of] biological recording citizen-science platforms … may be compromised if databases become appreciably contaminated by media produced by generative text-to-image machine-learning models.” The platforms to which the scienti