Birds of Singapore
by the Bird Society of Singapore
AI is all around us now. In our search engines, image editing apps, and even in our phones. How will this affect the way we keep track of bird records?
Earlier today, there were a lot of fun photos on our website, “drawings” of birds in Singapore in place of real images of them. Consider yourself April fooled! These drawings were a little different from the ones we put up on April Fools’ two years ago… because we didn’t draw them – machines did. On a more serious note, AI tools have changed the way a lot of people do things, and we might not even be aware of all the ways in which AI is being used in our daily lives. Some of the images we put up on our site today. Even with good prompts, some of the most advanced image-generation models struggle; the Oriental Magpie-Robin is an Oriental Magpie, the Greater Coucal has two tails, the pond herons get progressively worse from left to right, the Crested Honey-Buzzard looks all wrong, and the Large-tailed Nightjar has a comical tail. I want to emphasize four points at the start of this article. The April Fools’ prank of changing a limited number of bird images to AI generations highlights not just the fact that AI exists today and can be used to generate images, but it also shows the immense shortcomings of these models. These are the precise focus of this article, in fact, and we believe it is imperative that this is highlighted to as wide an audience as possible. It is immediately obvious that every AI-generated image that was uploaded on our site today is flawed in one way or another, even though none of the prompts asked for two-tailed birds, birds with four wings, or similar. Generating images using AI does not strengthen these models – if anything, they would be weakened by attempting to train on the low-quality outputs produced. Intellectual property is a very pressing issue with AI today. AI models have been trained on all kinds of copyrighted data, from art painstakingly crafted by artists, to entire novels, films, and documentaries. We do not aim to minimize this in the slightest, and it raises important points on both ethical and legal levels, as highlighted in this article. Yet, reality demands that we are aware of what the future holds – and as mentioned, we think it is important that attention is brought to the issues caused by AI in ensuring scientific data integrity, which is a widely under-recognized topic and the focus of this article. Again, this is why we highlight that the generated images are not life-like and poorly representative in one way or another, even though this was not asked for. On a slightly unrelated note, the environmental implications of AI models have been discussed extensively. The math for this isn’t clear, as highlighted in this article. The processors that power AI models are also getting twice as energy-efficient every 3-4 years. The reality is that AI is here to stay, for better or for worse, and it is likely to change a lot of things that we know today. This article is specifically about how AI can affect how we keep track of bird records, which are important for influencing conservation. Singapore is also a place where there is always great interest among the birding community whenever a rare bird is seen; we all want to “twitch” the latest rare bird for ourselves, and some of us are also interested in bird identification. So these topics are very pertinent as they strike at how AI will change birding for all of us. Malicious uses of AI This part is straightforward. Tools which can generate realistic images can be used to create fake images of real birds. Reverse image searching to find the image online wouldn’t work because the image is newly generated. It’s also possible to falsely enhance images, for example, by adding a fake bird to an image with real birds in them – for example, taking a photo with two chicks in a nest and making it three. Malicious uses of AI extend beyond what we are able to advise on – they are ultimately about people behaving dishonestly, and not a problem with the tool itself. If someone really wanted to fake a bird sighting, they could just take a photo taken overseas and claim it was taken in Singapore too. This happens, we have seen it, and we should keep looking out for it. But the focus of this article is more on how you might unknowingly fall into the traps of AI. Seemingly harmless uses of AI Image editing software like Photoshop and Lightroom have been around for years now, and many of us use these tools to enhance images. General image editing and finer-scale adjustments like branch removal are commonplace. But AI brings this to a different dimension. One example is with object removal. Without AI, removing large objects in front of a bird is impossible – because ‘filling in’ the missing details is not possible without knowing what the bird should look like. But that still doesn’t mean that AI somehow knows what the bird should look like either! It doesn’t have X-ray vision to be able to see what’s behind the leaf in the image on the left below, for example: White's Thrush at Singapore Botanic Gardens in Nov 2023 Yet the software...