Honest talk. There's actually a mini crisis in birding and animal photography because of the use of AI. Images generated or altered with AI without disclosure are being published as facts in scientific journals and misleading research efforts on the health of animal populations which are vital to guide conservation efforts. Many biologists and scientists depend on the photographs of amateur or professional wildlife photographers. AI is inducing error and noise in the information they get to work with.

[–] LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 3 points 4 hours ago

Just to add a little more context here, it's not just that people are using AI to make fake pictures, it's that AI tools in photography apps are making enough adjustments in the photo that one bird might get turned into a different bird by the enhancement tools.

It's especially problematic, because a bird that's native to a very small area in a less developed part of the world might not have many examples of it online.

One example: Someone might take a picture of a bird in the Amazon, and photoshop takes the picture and uses AI to clean it up, and the result is that it turns into a picture of a common north american bird. Which then becomes a "documented" case of a common north american bird being sighted in an uncommon location.

Making it even worse

the photographer might not even understand what happened. They might truly believe that they found this unique scenario.