- A book by Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky imagines a superintelligent AI planting false memories as one way it might manipulate what people believe.
- A far smaller version of that problem is already happening: users of platforms like iNaturalist are enhancing photos with AI, which distorts the data scientists depend on.
- Citizen science submissions serve as a live sensor of the natural world, showing whether plants bloom early or species shift north as the climate changes.
- In one case an AI edit turned an epaulet oriole into a red-winged blackbird, producing a bogus sighting in Central Brazil where the bird had not been recorded.
- Researchers writing in Nature say contributors need to be taught how image editing damages the scientific record.
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AI Photo Edits Are Corrupting Nature Databases
Nature lovers using AI to touch up wildlife photos are introducing false species records into citizen science platforms that scientists rely on for tracking plants and animals.
From AI StopWatch, published with their permission.
The summaries and the full Spanish translation are produced automatically. The original is always linked.