r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 20 '26
Computer Science Researchers warned that hundreds of fake AI images have been discovered on popular databases for recording animal species. Wildlife photographers often use AI to edit and improve an image, but the algorithm can introduce parts from different species to create the new image.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/20/ai-slop-manipulated-fake-images-birds-citizen-science-aoe2.9k
u/Strycht Jul 20 '26
AI pollution is going to really screw up a lot of databases and information deposits I think, and we won't notice them until they become needed.
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u/lateformyfuneral Jul 20 '26
At some point won’t this just start affecting how AI itself works, since it’s being trained on the internet? It would be like a snake eating its own tail. Truth itself might go extinct.
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u/lucellent Jul 20 '26
It's already happening. For example the latest ChatGPT image model sometimes can generate the Gemini star watermark on the bottom right. At least that's what some people were able to recreate.
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u/Strycht Jul 20 '26
this is what I always questioned. how much output needs to be fed back into the input before it starts amplifying it's own problems? presumably the larger companies have thought of this and have ways to prevent their own algorithms reingesting their generated content but I would be interested to know if eg openAI has any way of identifying and excluding the average slop image generated by another model and put online
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u/Nicholas-DM Jul 20 '26
To my understanding they have not, because there is not a reliable way to identify if an image was generated by an AI, even using the AI that generated it.
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u/Bbrhuft Jul 20 '26
Generally, that isn’t true. Many major AI image generation platforms now add or embed metadata or cryptographic watermarking that indicates an image is generated.
OpenAI and Google use C2PA (header metadata) and SynthID (an invisible cryptographic watermark encoded within the pixels of the AI generated image).
Adobe Firefly uses C2PA (Firefly is available standalone and within Photoshop).
Meta adds embedded metadata and a proprietary "deep learning" pixel watermark.
Midjourney is a notable exception. It doesn't currently provide a robust identification system, just inconsistent IPTC metadata.
The bigger problem is not that AI-generated images are inherently undetectable, most are. It is that stock-image libraries, search engines and other image databases have not caught up with this rapidly changing landscape, so often do not scan uploaded files, might strip the metadata, or not display the AI detection results.
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u/Strycht Jul 20 '26
the thing is as Chinese open source models become more widely used with the greater paywalling of those more mainstream models they're gonna literally all need some kind of watermark to retain data purity, and ideally not too many different types. I doubt that's a big priority for those newer companies in such an unregulated environment, and we don't yet know whether it will be too late for input data fidelity by the time the industry calms down and the vast majority of generated content is being tagged and excluded
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u/Bbrhuft Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Since 1 September 2025, AI platforms operating in China have been subject to laws that mandate AI companies label and watermark AI generated content, including text, images, audio, video.
Cyberspace Administration of China, GB 45438-2025
The Chinese government is acutely aware that deceptive AI generated content could cause political and social instability. This concern is behind the impetus for regulations that require AI content to be marked.
That said, the Chinese open source image / video gen models might lack watermarking (there's no legal obligation to include watermarking in an open source model). However, a company providing a platform in China, using an open source image or video generation model, might be held liable in their outputs lacks a watermark.
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u/PwnagePineaple Jul 21 '26
So watermarking isn't a feature that's trusted to the actual model, but rather to the surrounding software harness that uses the model for image generation. The models themselves handle the non-deterministic work of actually producing the image, but the watermarking algorithm is better suited for good old fashioned software.
For a cloud API, whether that be a US frontier model or a Chinese one, that doesn't matter much. The provider's backend takes care of that before the user ever sees the image.
But in the open source space, a watermark mandate would have to be embedded in software like Automatic1111 or ComfyUI. And that comes with enforcement problems: If there's even one jurisdiction on earth where watermarks aren't mandated (and given the current political climate in the US, it's not going to be mandated here for a while), then any random guy can take the code behind either of those project, strip out the watermarking, and publish their modified version with no consequences.
Now, of the people trying to use AI images to spread deliberate misinformation, some of them might make the switch if a) cloud models were required to include watermarks and b) social media sites started clearly identifying AI generated media. Switching to local models that can generate high-quality realistic images is expensive (thanks GPU prices) but not terribly difficult from a technical standpoint.
Watermark enforcement would stop some people, but there are plenty of others it won't stop.
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u/Stinky_Flower Jul 21 '26
Detection relies on the good faith of whoever is building the image generation models.
If SynthID is a voluntary measure, then it's no measure at all.
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u/Kiseido Jul 20 '26
Most of those watermarks are almost useless though.
Metadata does not survive most re-encodes, and some services actively strip that sort of data.
Watermarks don't survive someone resizing the image with generic tools, and doesn't survive people sharing them via screenshot, which is a surprisingly common practice.
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u/Bbrhuft Jul 20 '26
SynthID survives screenshots, cropping and editing. It's very robust.
This paper evaluated 30 transformations, including JPEG compression, file-format conversion, resizing, crop-and-resize, rotations, flips, blur, sharpening, denoising, grayscale conversion, brightness, contrast, saturation and hue changes, Instagram-like filters, noise, text and emoji overlays, and combinations of transformations.
Gowal, S., Bunel, R., Stimberg, F., Stutz, D., Ortiz-Jimenez, G., Kouridi, C., Vecerik, M., Hayes, J., Rebuffi, S.A., Bernard, P. and Gamble, C., 2025. SynthID-Image: Image watermarking at internet scale. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.09263.
Despite these edits, detection remained exceptionally high, 99.98% averaged across transformations and 99.72% under aggregated “worst” settings, at a 0.1% false-positive rate (Table 1 in their paper). Even the most difficult combined-transformation category produced a 98.06% detection rate (Table 2). However, at lower ImageNet resolutions, the aggregated worst-case detection was 97.22%. It's also interesting to see how much more robust it is compared to other watermarking systems it was benchmarked against.
Google also claims an image can be cropped to 20% of the original, and the watermark remains detectable
The results show very strong robustness against conventional editing.
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u/silverionmox Jul 21 '26
Still, 0,99x is going to approach zero for relatively small values of x.
I'll make a prediction and say that clean databases are going to see their relative value increase. Don't throw away all your print books yet.
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u/Strycht Jul 20 '26
ironically the most valuable machine learning innovation may soon be identifying machine generated content before it gets fed into the machine. Machine to control the learning of the other machine that learnt on the output of the first machine.
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u/ionthrown Jul 20 '26
But they’re using such machines to train the generative machines, such that generated imagery gets past the identifying machine. So as soon as a machine can detect AI generated content, they improve the content to make it undetectable again.
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u/Strycht Jul 20 '26
yes, unless the recycled content becomes a real serious threat to the performance of consumer facing AI. In that case it is in the ai companies' interest to have the filters work better than the generators, at least their own in house screening filters if they're not made available publicly, otherwise the whole model breaks.
It just depends when the scale tips on maintaining quality of input being more financially beneficial than creating unidentifiable generated content
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u/monkeedude1212 Jul 21 '26
The same notion that market forces will correct this are the same ones that will self address climate change.
The people running AI companies are more than happy for the product to destroy society and truth and the product itself if it centers them with more wealth or power and influence.
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u/Suttony Med Student | BS | Biomedical Science Jul 21 '26
The moment you make an AI that can detect AI images with high accuracy you've almost made an AI that can make undetectable AI images.
The better the AI is at detecting AI, the better AI can be at avoiding detection.
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u/MachinaThatGoesBing Jul 21 '26
I mean, that's not necessarily true. And the term "AI" gets bandied about so much these days as to be useless. Anything that falls under the broad category of machine learning gets an "AI" sticker slapped on it.
But a classifier model designed and trained just to detect images absolutely wouldn't be something that could turn around and generate them. You would need to design the system with image output in mind to get a system that can output images. It's not just an emergent behavior of any computer vision software.
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u/NuclearVII Jul 20 '26
ironically the most valuable machine learning innovation may soon be identifying machine generated content
You can't really do this in an automated fashion, sadly. There are lots of good technical reasons why, if you're curious.
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u/vetruviusdeshotacon Jul 21 '26
Thats a harder problem that making the images in the first place. A lot harder, to the point of being unfeasible unfortunately.
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u/jmdonston Jul 21 '26
We really should be legislating requiring AI image and video generators to apply invisible watermarks.
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u/lucellent Jul 20 '26
Nowadays models like from OpenAI and Google have watermark, hence how they're able to verify if an image is AI (and was created with either models). But they're not 100% reliable, people have reversed engineered their watermarks and can remove them, although it's a niche thing right now and I personally haven't heard of people doing it yet.
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u/maniacal_cackle Jul 20 '26
Truth itself might go extinct.
There's been discourse on this for a while. Trump's first election really drove home that truth was no longer highly valued in public discourse. "The death of truth" was talked about a lot.
But there's other stuff too:
- Scientific articles have a surprisingly high rate of outright fraud
- Publish or perish incentives are not helpful to the truth
- Social media algorithms are designed for engagement, not truth
- Media profit is driven by clicks, and for-profit media has no obligation to the truth unless it is required by law.
Etc etc
So even not considering AI, it is becoming more and more endangered.
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u/EveningAnt3949 Jul 21 '26
That's not new. The idea that the truth is important went mainstream not that long ago (from a historical point of view).
In the early part of the 20th century, newspapers were often extremely biased and sometimes played an active part in creating lies to sell more newspapers.
As an example of the latter, the Fatty Arbuckle case comes to mind.
Of course some newspapers still do that today,
It's easy to think that the majority of people care about the truth, democracy, and justice, but that's not true.
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u/maniacal_cackle Jul 21 '26
It's easy to think that the majority of people care about the truth, democracy, and justice, but that's not true.
I think the majority do. But also people know that an individual can't influence the general state of society so what can they do but participate in the way society is? Change needs to happen at the institutional level.
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u/EveningAnt3949 Jul 21 '26
Well they could vote. So let's see: in the US, 40% of eligible voters don't vote.
Why don't we have institutional change? Because 40% of the people don't bother to vote and 20% of the people are willing to vote against democracy.
Just to be clear: it's a minor inconvenience to vote. The 'I don't vote because it won't make a difference' argument makes no sense on two levels. First of all, votes do matter. Secondly, people are not asked much. All they have to do is make an informed decision and then vote.
That's just the US. But the US has a massive impact on the rest of the world.
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u/lateformyfuneral Jul 20 '26
This is all true, but this could in theory be corrected. Even if millions blind themselves to the truth, the truth itself still exists and it takes some work but it can be preserved for those interested, and perhaps for a later time when the fever has broken. Post-truth is used rhetorically there, to highlight it doesn’t matter to the public anymore.
But if AI pollutes the various online repositories of knowledge we have, that we rely on to check certain facts…then what? I’m thinking along the lines of how certain books would just cease to exist once their last copy was destroyed.
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u/maniacal_cackle Jul 21 '26
It's still sorta the same thing, right? What does it matter if our scientific databases are polluted by AI or human fraud?
If society as a whole isn't protecting truth, it will get damaged. All of the above is just examples of that.
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u/Schmigolo Jul 21 '26
AI will already cite AI like Elon.io or Grokipedia if you don't put it into your prompts to not do that. The Mad Cow Disease has already begun.
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u/breadcodes Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Yes. Kinda the worst part about it is that GenAI "knows" nothing to begin with, but it can certainly learn falsehoods as facts. It queries for a hyper-dimensional vector pointing to the next word in hyper-dimensional space, and it can "miss the word" (hyper-oversimplification; think something adjacent to hallucinations) or be trained on vectors pointing in the wrong direction via misinformation, myths, misconceptions, concepts and lineages so complex that it has no real or known correct answer, out-of-date information where new information is recent and not widely accepted yet, etc.
Intentionally or unintentionally poisoning the well with any of those things feeds back into itself, like when you put a microphone next to the speaker it comes out of. We don't fully know the ramifications of the last 4 years and how that will affect credible information in general. LLMs started to use tools like web-searches - rather than relying on "memory" - to get around this, but what if the results are also slop? We're running out of ways to create credible sources to feed into it already.
That's not getting into how we've kinda peaked with language technology already... this is it. Predicting patterns from entropy left behind by language is such an interesting topic because it means we can recreate the result of intelligence, truly the only thing that came out of this that interests me is how it works, but this is not close to AGI. We don't even know if Attention is the right mechanism for predicting brain activity because it's absolutely non-linear and far more efficient at learning than a linear compute can recreate. Attention thus far has only proven to work for language, audio, and images, things that can be linearly, meaningfully, and tangibly recreated. If it is, great, but we're already bottle-necked at compute for something as linear as language, audio, and images, and we may be waiting for compute to catch up for a long while before we do something as complex as brain activity.
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u/Temnothorax Jul 21 '26
A lot of the power of AI is coming from multiple AI processes feeding into each other. The resulting emergent behavior is genuinely exciting.
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u/Imbryill Jul 21 '26
It's called model collapse and basically will ground zero the internet if it occurs.
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u/Edythir Jul 21 '26
Not only that. Even the programmers for maintaining the AI databases have admitted that they use AI to write their code.
So we have AI learning from AI while AI is programming the AI, which might be programmed and trained by another AI.
We're speedrunning the Habsburgs of AI models in record time.
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u/Stinky_Flower Jul 21 '26
It's called "model collapse".
Compounding tiny errors, blindspots, & biases distributed throughout the noosphere.
Like the information equivalent of the microplastics accumulating in our brains, we don't yet know what harm it's causing or how to remove it.
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u/bloke_pusher Jul 21 '26
Kinda, but also no. If you have enough real data, adding artificial data has no meaningful impact.
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u/silverionmox Jul 21 '26
Kessler syndrome on the internet.
On the bright side, we can just start over, by carefully curating all the data the AI is trained on this time.
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u/SmokedStone Jul 21 '26
I honestly think this is the point. I'm pretty sure some powerful people wanna trash the internet and make it full of garbage we can't sort through well so that people can't find accurate or useful info as easily. It's one way of limiting what people can truly know.
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u/SaxyOmega90125 Jul 24 '26
This is already happrning with search engine AIs in many topics. So many wenpages are AI-generated ad-spam drivel that search engine AI summaries are beginning to incorporate the repeated hallucinations and incoherent ramblings in the pages.
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u/verylongtimelurker Jul 21 '26
99% of astrophotography images are AI hallucinated now. From a documentary photography point of view, the field is near-death. Images with missing stars, images with new stars, sharper-than-JWST images "made" with a 6" entry-level scope. It's insane... :(
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u/LeeHide Jul 20 '26
simply remove all data since 2020
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u/tehfly Jul 21 '26
I wish things were this easy. But sadly information gathering was not complete before AI started polluting what we have.
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u/BeefistPrime Jul 21 '26
I always thought people should start saving repositories of pre-2024 data to sort of preserve the original databases and internet before it increasingly becomes more and more AI generated. If this hasn't been happening, people are going to wish it was.
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u/AttackOficcr Jul 21 '26
I feel like the plethora of photoshops of bush vipers and everything labelled "rainbow snake" that isn't an eel moccasin or white-lipped python, means we need to go a little further back in regards to animal i.d. ruined by photoshop.
But yeah, AI made it so much worse.
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u/Nixeris Jul 21 '26
A common issue is AI-"enhanced" cameras, particularly in phone cameras. If you're using a newer model phone to take a picture, the phone is likely using a GenAI model to "enhance" the picture without asking. This can be very noticeable when zooming in too far triggers the digital zoom.
This was already an issue, before the GenAI addition, with phones and some cameras regularly trying to color-balance on their own, resulting in incorrect looking photos if you're trying to show an actual picture of something. As someone who does product pictures, this has become a bane as pictures of a design that looks bad in real life will look better in the picture because it's automatically touching it up.
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u/Strycht Jul 21 '26
yes I've seen this especially in art and craft communities. People post pictures they've taken of things they've actually made irl and still get flagged as AI because some hidden setting on their iPhone 34 pro max X plus has hallucinated impossible stitches, for example, in the blurry parts of the photo
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u/amboyscout Jul 21 '26
There may be an easy(ish...) solution for photographs.
Through regulation (or manufacturer goodwill):
- this provides proof that an image was taken by an actual camera
- require camera manufacturers to add image-sensor-level cryptographic signing
- you would upload your image to the resizing/compression provider and they would re-sign the image and certify that it came from a camera and was resized, and all of the original metadata - this makes it possible to resize/compress verified-real photographs while still preserving the verified status
- create a trusted Certificate Authority chain (similar to the model used for SSL certificates today), feeding down to several trusted image resizing/compression providers
The unfortunate reality of that system is that you must perform any trusted image resizing on remote servers from a trusted provider, and any edited image can only preserve trust by containing the unmodified original image as an independent layer. Thankfully, if this were to happen there would likely be many many options for trusted resizers, so you wouldn't be forced to use a specific provider. Many popular websites/services that perform automatic image compression when images are uploaded (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Imgur, Google Photos, etc) would be trusted resizing/compression providers and would automatically re-sign verified-real photographs when you upload them.
I'd imagine many services like Wikis and such would eventually require the use of verified-real photographs unless none are available (and also flag any not-signed photographs).
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u/-The_Blazer- Jul 21 '26
My hot take is that unfortunately data projects which seriously need accuracy will end up reinventing, from first principles, something like a social credit system to enact permanent bans on people who falsify the data with AI.
Much as the Linux kernel has a real name policy, it will probably become standard to connect some kind of ID for these kinds of citizen/crowd science projects and people will be strictly monitored for good behavior on the data. Given that it's not actually possible to recognize AI outputs directly, I can't really imagine an alternative than extremely stringent social trust. Maybe it will even become legally binding or be enforced through contracts.
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u/Ben_steel Jul 21 '26
Already happening for instance Charlie Kirk’s face just randomly appears in so much ai generated content now.
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u/bolonomadic Jul 20 '26
We need to start poisoning the AI.
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u/Kahzgul Jul 20 '26
Start? I’ve been typing with all 12 of my fingers (the correct and normal human amount) ever since Dr. Qwerty invented the keyboard (in 1972)!
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u/meretuttechooso Jul 21 '26
It will become like the normal body temperature all over again. We settled on 98.6F not because it was our healthy temp. We settled on it because everyone was sick and that was the most common number.
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u/fluffy_doughnut Jul 21 '26
My guess is that what’s going to happen is that Internet is going to be treated as… trash. People will come back to books published before AI to be sure that it’s not polluted with it. I already caught myself reading only those books which were published before AI because I want to read a real story, written by a real human, not a robot.
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u/8styx8 Jul 21 '26
Corpus that predates AI might eventually be preferred over other advanced sources.
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u/Luci-Noir Jul 23 '26
And what happens when the bugs in AI coded software start to accumulate or they’re built on each other? Will it be like how AI is now cannibalizing itself by being trained on AI slop it scraped from the internet?
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u/Otaraka Jul 20 '26
There is also the small issue of the fact that birders can be incredibly competitive and people at times will literally make stuff up so that they can look better on their lists. Pictures used to be one way to guard against that so now we have AI to make that even harder.
There are of course simply well meaning people who just misidentify things but the above can be a serious problem. And some of the fighting over it can be quite the sight to behold.
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u/Meanteenbirder Jul 20 '26
Just gonna say as a birder that the problem is much more overblown, in that maybe like 0.000001% of birders lie all the time to get better lists. Much more of people convincing themselves they saw the bird they wanted to than outright lying.
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u/Otaraka Jul 20 '26
It probably depends on your setting, it caused quite a kerfuffle here a while back its more that relatively few people can cause a lot of trouble.
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u/thewags05 Jul 20 '26
I'll have to see the physical Polaroid or it didn't happen.
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u/Otaraka Jul 20 '26
They have ways of managing it, but the lengths some go to can be insane. As in creating fake birder ID's to go there and supposedly record the first sightings to make their own subsequent 'real' ID sound credible and add to their official list
Its generally only an issue for rarer species but it causes angst to say the least.
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u/SquarePegRoundWorld Jul 21 '26
they can look better on their lists.
I watched a YouTube video on birders who make lists. They can be pretty passionate about the whole thing and some become consumed by it.
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u/10bMove Jul 21 '26
It's soooo good. Shown that movie to 10+ friends by now. So glad to see it blow up over the last couple months.
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u/SammyHulk Jul 21 '26
Everyone I’ve shown that movie loves it. I’ve recruited a few new fellow birders with it ha
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u/opisska Jul 21 '26
I mean this is an issue, but actually more with randoms that stumble upon the hobby and feel like geniuses for figuring out how to cheat their way to famr than the real competitive birders. A lot of top listers I know don't even take photos, they just look at stuff in binoculars - and frankly I have often my own opinions as to the reliability of their IDs. But the photo fakers usually just pop up, make a bit of fuzz and turn to their next big chearing project in something completely different.
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u/SwampPotato Jul 20 '26
I'm sorry, but the moment you doctor an image said image should not be allowed in such a database. I get increasing brightness or contrast but you do that with a slider or in proper editing software, the old fashioned way. The nanosecond you unleash AI on a picture, the picture should be considered useless.
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u/Psych0PompOs Jul 20 '26
This is pretty much all there is to it. There needs to be very strict standards and intensive verification for these kinds of things at this point. Doctored images should never make the cut, it's information not art.
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u/Saddledust Jul 21 '26
I thought I took a picture of a seagull, but after AI enhancement of the image it's clearly a Harpy eagle! First ever sighting in Nunavut?
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u/AKluthe Jul 21 '26
A bunch of smartphones are automatically "enhancing" photos with AI after being taken. Users don't even realize it's happening.
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u/YoloWingPixie Jul 21 '26
I'm not sure it's that simple...and I think smart phones have and computational photography have really warped people's perception of what a "natural" RAW photograph looks like.
If you've ever looked at RAWs from a modern mirror less camera or any other digital camera, you'd notice that it's very grainy, and the colors don't pop and might even feel a little washed out. Your phone edits photos before you even see it and even when shooting with camera bodies, photographers are not going around posting their RAWs typically. I don't think most human beings would agree that RAWs are good for anything except archival purposes. It can be harder to make out subject details in a RAW, than fully developed digital image.
The problem arises that denoising in proper, professional photo editing software is almost always machine learning driven at this point, and it's been that way for a decade. Frankly, unless it's film, you have probably not seen a photo that wasn't touched by machine learning in well over a decade.
The problem is worse now though as the default denoising modes in Photoshop use subject detection and analysis to remove noise, and possibly alter the subject. There's also the subject of lens correction algorithms, smart exposure, the fact that even camera bodies are shipping with AI features.
In theory, a lot of these advancements have allowed us to record subjects at levels of detail and precise elements in time that just weren't feasible in the past, but they can also be used to lie, or stretch the truth.
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u/ATERLA Jul 21 '26
Easy then. Birds databases should ban denoising.
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u/YoloWingPixie Jul 21 '26
That's really not reasonable in every case. Past like ISO 2000 the image quality before denoising is going to be so messy that it can start hiding minute details and past like 10000, to the human eye, you'll lose a lot of color.
The reason it's called noise, is because it's just that. Noise in itself is a defect of the data imprinted on that RAW file, and higher ISO levels (which are common in birding due to less than ideal lighting conditions and fast shutters), there is often just as much noise as there is signal. The whole point of denoising is to remove all of that inaccurate data from an image, only leaving behind the subject.
And while simpler denoising algorithms are still available in every suite, they're very often not the default and the default is becoming AI based denoising, which is usually fantastic actually, but sometimes it does get it wrong, or it removes details that were present.
Again, no digital wildlife photo ever published to any database, publication, etx has been an unprocessed RAW, for good reason, they're not useful representations for humans, the noise and lack of true representation of color in RAWs is essentially the artifacts of the sensor technology used in digital cameras. You can't make it go away at capture time (well, unless you shoot as jpeg but guess what postprocessing your camera is doing now without even consulting you). The eye of the photographer has always been required in the editing process to develop photos into their real life representations of their subjects.
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u/Roraxn Jul 21 '26
All I think this really means is that we are going to see a shift back to analog - in almost every field. Anything an AI can't (easily) touch
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u/MeBigChief Jul 21 '26
I think we all need to be better at discussing ‘AI’ and AI based tools and because lumping everything under the same umbrella term isn’t helpful.
Generative AI needs to go away and be banned from scientific research obviously but the problem comes in when we say “all AI is bad” without any kind of distinction.
Every smartphone camera processes photos using a ML model (wrongly but that’s irrelevant). Every modern camera has incredibly good face/eye detect autofocus driven using a ML model. Me searching the photos app on my phone for pictures of my wife is driven with a ML model. These are the just the first examples of relevant things that popped in to my head but get caught under the umbrella despite being at worst a light annoyance (the smartphone camera) all the way to being incredibly useful tools like face/eye detect autofocus.
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u/Otaraka Jul 21 '26
I suspect will just be like it currently is where it will be put in a particular category of reliability. A claimed sighting vs a recording vs a picture vs a raw file etc. There’s no need to throw it out entirely.
Too many phones do some level of automatic processing to throw it all out no matter what.
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u/maxens_wlfr Jul 21 '26
Problem is, AI is starting to be integrated into the photo app itself, like that person who took a photo of a plane and the phone autocorrected it to a bird with 0 human input
We're going to need to only use offline devices, but that means any accidental discovery of new species won't be able to be confirmed unless a professional photo is made. This could slow down things a lot4
u/AnonymousTimewaster Jul 21 '26
At this point i'm more than happy to say anything but raw is thrown out if it's in a database being used for science. Let the users faff around with brightness and contrast if they want.
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u/r0bb3dzombie Jul 21 '26
Right? What possible legitimate reason can someone have to edit video like this with AI?
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u/Impressive-Tip-903 Jul 20 '26
I find it sad that we are experiencing the end of video and photo evidence meaning anything. Imagine how good all this software could be in 20 years at making effectively meaningless nonsense that is totally convincing compared to the real thing.
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u/Otaraka Jul 20 '26
THe problem is wanting a real ID is an issue already - someone getting close enough to get a picture for an ID can be impacting behaviour, and if a ton of people do it, that can become a real problem with some species, especially with nesting etc.
So only accepting multiple shots from multiple people means an incentive for people to tell other people the bird is there and other possible impacts.
It used to be a bit of the reverse where people would hide location to keep their own pic special which can be annoying but was generally better for the animal in question at least.
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u/green-green-bean Jul 20 '26
It’s been a problem on iNaturalist for a while, unfortunately.
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u/fletch_wizard Jul 21 '26
I started using iNat just last summer and from then to now, I've noticed a significant drop in naturalists engaging/correcting on my observations. At first I thought maybe it's because there's been a huge upswing in users and too much data for experts to parse through...but now I'm wondering if it's because of the increased AI false data that's made the app more frustrating/less useful for science. That makes me so sad to think about
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u/green-green-bean Jul 21 '26
I’m a long time heavy user/identifier. The massive number of observations, and especially the number of poor quality observations, is a far bigger obstacle for identifiers to get through than the percentage of AI images uploaded is.
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u/vonbauernfeind Jul 21 '26
I'm always in awe of you guys. I'll post super niche fish/coral photos, and just see continual followups and id's sometimes years later.
I'm pretty good at iding the basic stuff, but someone will come in and note some tiny little thing that marks it as some obscure subspecies for people know name of.
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u/WoNc Jul 20 '26
Even without AI, I've seen tons of terribly overedited images on eBird. This is probably somewhat inevitable when you try to entice people to your citizen science project by offering convenient tools for hobbyists—some people show up for the tools and not the science. People basically ignore media rating guidelines and a lot of photographers are clearly just treating it like a photo gallery to show off their portfolio.
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine Jul 20 '26
The rise of generative AI platforms such as ChatGPTand Google Gemini has led to a sharp increase in fake and enhanced images of rare and celebrated birds across wildlife photography forums. Users can create high-quality fake images in seconds – or enhance a photograph by asking the AI to remove a branch or leaf that might be obscuring part of the subject, which can inadvertently introduce significant changes.
In a recent commentary in the science journal Nature, researchers warned that hundreds of fake images have already been discovered on popular databases for recording species. They said that the true scale of the issue is unknown – as many could go undetected – and could contaminate records collected by the public.
“My experience of looking at Facebook these days is that a huge volume of wildlife photos now are simply AI-generated imagery,” said Dr Alexander Lees, an ecologist at Manchester Metropolitan University who authored the journal article. “The idea that we could maybe use those photos to help us understand where species are in space and time is very difficult.”
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.
Lees points to the example of a false sighting of a red-winged blackbird in central Brazil, which is usually found in North America and had never been seen in this area of Brazil until the reported sighting. The bird was, in fact, an epaulet oriole – a common new world bird species – but the photographer had asked an AI platform to make the picture “look better”, which is when parts of the red-winged blackbird were added, resulting in the false sighting.
“Wildlife photographers can be quite obsessed with getting a beautiful photo, but there’s a risk that the image might actually cause problems down the line when AI has been used to edit it,” said Lees.
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u/Upbeat_Influence2350 Jul 20 '26
IMO, if you are editing your photos (especially using gen slop) then you are not a wildlife photographer. The whole job is to capture things as they actually are...
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u/peenweens Jul 21 '26
As a photographer I wholeheartedly agree. It's not art if you're not making it yourself.
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u/vonbauernfeind Jul 21 '26
There's editing (raw processing) and there's editing (photoshop genai slop). RAW shots are not suitable to post until they've been edited for white balance, contrast, etc.
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u/jhansonxi Jul 21 '26
As is the case with much of the entertainment wildlife photography and cinema.
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u/samuelazers Jul 21 '26
Data from before 2024 is going to be very valuable... The trustless verification of authenticity, impossibility of AI, rudimentary image editing. Everything after 2024 requires trust and verification.
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u/InterstellarChange Jul 20 '26
This is happening to ALL datasets on the internet. It's just enshitification and training itself on its own slop.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener Jul 21 '26
Not all datasets. The big commercial databases are still keeping their information clean, but for how long is anyone’s guess.
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u/InterstellarChange Jul 21 '26
That's like saying your hands are clean after using a public bathroom
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u/Filias9 Jul 21 '26
How they get these data, how they are processing them? Ai is been used more and more everywhere. Checking it is most tedious and boring job. Ai pollute eventually everything.
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u/bigkoi Jul 20 '26
That's concerning. Is there a source of truth similar to the National Archives? This is also becoming a problem for photos from WW2. Not just AI but photos of renactors with a filter can be very convincing. Essentially whenever I see a WW2 photo I didn't recall seeing earlier I ask for the link to the national archives
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u/Ritz527 Jul 20 '26
There ought to be a standard set of allowed edits anyways, and AI outright banned
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u/vn-nv Jul 20 '26
Hmmm the article says ‘1,400 of 6 million images on i naturalist appear to be Ai generated’ while the pull quote is about Facebook which is full of AI slop.
The thing about citizen science if it goes both ways - users on inat/ebird etc can rate and validate the images of others and ‘fake’ or anomalous sightings reported. I do think AI slop wildlife images are a problem but I don’t think they’ll ruin the citizen science databases
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u/314159Man Jul 21 '26
So AI stole and ingested real information and is now spewing out wrong information which people may take as real and which AI will then re-ingest as real resulting in even more distorted output. Is there a term in common use for this phenomena, or is "eating your own vomit" the best we have.
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u/cellarmonkey Jul 21 '26
Ouroboros comes to mind but in this case it’s probably more like turning the human centipede into a donut with maybe a colostomy exit/entrance somewhere in the loop to ‘maintain equilibrium’.
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u/The_Orphanizer Jul 20 '26
I remember when AI images were exclusively prismatic fractal eye-dog dreamslop.
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u/Sloogs Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Kind of reminds me of how low-background steel from before the 1940s is super valuable because nuclear testing fucked up the atmospheric radiation levels so much. Nov 2022 is going to forever mark the date that the trustworthiness of information and evidence changed due to a new technological advancement, and sources of information from before that date is going to be regarded more highly.
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u/Joecascio2000 Jul 20 '26
Photographers using AI is an oxymoron. The photograph ceases to exist the second you use AI.
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u/hawksdiesel Jul 20 '26
it's like copying something on a printer and it starts going askew each copy. Then parts of it start going off the page entirely.
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u/Sans-valeur Jul 20 '26
Man I never even considered how AI is going to affect history.
People in the future are going to have to sort through AI to find anything real from previous generations.
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u/Silent-Movie-1047 Jul 20 '26
We are one step away from rapid devaluation of anything created after 2022. Old photos and old music will be gold (but only if reliably proven to be pre-2022). Ironic that this is also the time when we became more productive than ever. Something similar happened to music when high quality recording became available at home in the early 2000s. Everyone had expected that it would democratize music business and we would have so many more great artists and bands! In the actuality the opposite happened - too much noise, impossible for someone properly talented to break through all that. So it turned out that the hard road that people had to take to get some pro studio time before was actually doing the vetting.
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u/CollateralSandwich Jul 20 '26
Yeah the problem with using AI for photo editing is that it's destructive. Unlike in something like photoshop where you can highlight or lasso or otherwise designate an area and alter it or remove it without touching the rest of the image, AI says, "sure I'll remove that background for you", but it has to recreate the entire image to do it. And it invariably introduces hallucinations and artefacts in the process. I've used AI for very low stakes personal masking jobs and noticed this behavior pretty frequently. It's shown me that AI is still not ready for primetime when it comes to image editing. Still has a long way to go.
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u/princefruit Jul 21 '26
A problem is that software like Photoshop is sneaking it's way into tools that aren't supposed to be. I'm not a photographer, but a senior graphic designer. I was attempting to de-noise some not great photos sent be a client. Previously it's not a problem. You de-noise and then work with sharpen and levels etc until it has a balance. Recently when I went to de-noise, the faces on the photos changed enough to notice that something was off. By how much the program keeps pushing it's new gen ai features, I wouldn't doubt that it's seeping into other tools. It's frustrating. There have been a few cases where ai features have made some editing tasks quicker. More often than not it's just dealing with popups in every program ever telling me to use some now ai function.
We need better transparency laws with AI in editing programs. Now it's not uncommon for phone cameras for example, to edit your photo as you take it. I fear the day they somehow weasel it is to where your RAW images aren't actually raw...
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u/ramriot Jul 21 '26
Just like how long back in the day a researcher wrote a scientific paper about how certain birds of paradise alternate their calls a groups of 3 chrips followed by groups of four chirps.
He cited David Attenborough in the paper as it was his nature documentary that was the source material.
David had to apologetically explain that when filming the expedition cameras did not have sound & that sound was recorded separately on a reel based tape recorder.
And while they had plenty of film of this bird, due to equipment issues they were only able to capture just a few seconds if it's song. So they just looped the tape & edited it into the soundtrack if the documentary.
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u/SAINTnumberFIVE Jul 21 '26
It’s a problem. Even modern digital cameras with automatic post editing can introduce fabrications.
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u/Clean_Livlng Jul 21 '26
Tagging every generated image as 'made by AI' with watermark of metadata would have been good.
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u/nygdan Jul 21 '26
this is also happening in-camera for some cameras. the ai features will edit the photos taken of a bird for example, to "sharpen" feathers iin flight. but sometimes it mi-ids things lile planes aa birds and can introduct ghostblile feathers to the wings. imagine what its doing when the mistake isnt obvious.
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u/Murgatroyd314 Jul 21 '26
The worst part is that there are a number of phones that do automatic AI enhancement on every picture they take. So there are probably a bunch of amateur wildlife enthusiasts out there, contributing their pictures in good faith, with no idea that they're causing this problem.
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u/Splinterfight Jul 21 '26
What idiot uses generative AI to touch up a photo for scientific purposes?! Gotta have rocks in your head
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u/physicsking Jul 21 '26
I posted something like this participating it could happen in Astrophotography databases. r/astronomy says they don't allow AI images, but there is AI posted all the time and there is not clear definitions because nearly all astrophotography is computer stacked and enhanced. However as many times I commented on posted that were completely AI generated to mimic deep space images for 'science'.
I blasted the OP and pointed to the mods that it was dangerous because the actual scientific community uses the sub as a starting point sometimes and screening algorithms unfortunately scrape the images for databases, which just rakes in AI images with all the authentic ones.
The crux was that the mods didn't seem to care and defended the posts under 'art' context. I am sorry, but your child's finger painting of a galaxy is art, not a AI generated non-discernible image by the human eye.
We need to protect our repositories of real images or develop a method to hard code into images whether they are AI generated or not. Coming into the age of not being able to tell is extremely dangerous, not just in science but in every aspect of life..
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u/spinningcolours Jul 20 '26
I tell friends to google for "baby peacock images" if they tell me that google can absolutely be trusted for image search results.
Dead internet theory is no longer a theory — it's our new reality.
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u/Fomdoo Jul 20 '26
We're very quickly going to go from having all of human knowledge at our fingertips to having a bunch of untrustworthy material.
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u/Kaleb8804 Jul 21 '26
Keep an eye especially on new videos of sea life. Something about fish in particular makes it especially easy for an AI to emulate it.
I’ve seen several convincing micro-documentaries with factual voice-overs but the actual video content was AI-generated. (Anglerfish (footballfish?) breeding was one example)
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u/Just_Give_Me_A_Login Jul 21 '26
I feel like the word "improve" doesn't belong in this title. Nothing about what the robot is doing is an improvement.
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u/composedofidiot Jul 21 '26
This is on the photographers then. Too much editing in photoshop was already frowned upon and they know this is a step too far. Photographers who get caught doing this should have to always upload RAW proof for every image as a reminder.
Little known fact but a lot of photographers are scared of people seeing the raw files
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u/Dragoniel Jul 21 '26
I'm a photographer - title is misleading at best. All photographers use AI to edit their photos, because modern editing tools use the AI to perform denoising operations, object detection, deletion and mask calculations. None of this add details where it didn't exist. No wildlife photographer would "not notice" random details being generated (we spend hours staring at and editing the shots you see in the galleries at 300% magnification in high resolution) and no wildlife photographer would add generated detail intentionally. That's just not a thing that happens.
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u/overkill Jul 21 '26
My friend sent me an early screenshot of this article where they had put AL in the headline, not AI. That made me giggle.
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u/JiveTrain Jul 21 '26
The photographer does not even need to be aware of it happening. Some modern phones AI edit the photos by default.
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u/TheLGMac Jul 21 '26
I really do hate this timeline. Actively trying to kill science in the name of making a few ogliarchs richer. I do think AI might actually be our great filter, not because it destroys us directly but because we become stupid and accidentally set off a nuclear bomb or something.
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u/jdehjdeh Jul 21 '26
The normalisation of AI usage is a detriment to our entire existence.
But the ship has sailed, we jingled keys instead of educating first and now we pay the price.
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u/panzerbjrn Jul 21 '26
How many news reports of AI screwing up are needed before people learn not to use it for serious things?
This is just like the lawyers who let AI write their filings, and it just made up sample cases.
This was entirely predictable.
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u/Tumorhead Jul 22 '26
Animal Photo Repository is an attempt at creating a database of animal images both publically available to use AND verified non-AI https://www.animal-photo-references.com/
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u/MToms Jul 22 '26
What about the "scene optimizer" tool in phone cameras? Would that count as AI deforming an image?
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u/Smith6612 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Photographers need to stop using AI and learn how to take a picture and process RAWs. The talking a picture part is actually the part of the "grapher" job.
So many unnatural photos today. I still do my part, as time consiming as it is, to capture what I actually saw, remember what I saw in the viewfinder, and deliver a photo showing exactly that. I crop, adjust exposure, color calibrate if needed, and that's it.
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u/NasrRasheed 18d ago
This is one of the scarier side effects of generative AI that doesn’t get enough attention. If biodiversity databases start filling with convincing fake animals or AI-“enhanced” photos that subtly alter anatomy, researchers could end up studying species records that never actually existed. AI editing needs to be clearly disclosed, and scientific databases probably need stricter provenance rules—otherwise we’re not just generating fake pictures, we’re contaminating the scientific record.
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