A friend in Britain who had just watched a film featuring a British coastal walk, The Salt Path, urged me to see it. He said in his email the hit movie had stunning shots of ospreys.
Without sounding like a know-it-all, I had watched the film myself at the State Cinema and was in a position to correct him. The bird, in fact, was a peregrine falcon. But all the same, a bird of prey symbolised freedom and escape for a couple featured in the movie who were on the coastal walk in Dorset, Devon and Cornwell to escape pressures blighting their lives.
“So much for trusting AI,” said my friend, who went to on to Google a natural history of the peregrine from a more reliable source.
I was not in a hurry to dismiss artificial intelligence, though. Love it or hate it, AI is rapidly becoming a part of our daily lives, and becoming a part of the science of ornithology.
The AI computer science that uses machine learning to perform tasks otherwise accomplished by humans is being used to identify, track, and monitor wild birds, among other things.
For a few years now, scientists and researchers from around the world have used AI to learn more about the birds around us.
In one notable project in the United Sates, under the auspices of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, scientists are using radar sites from 48 American states, along with live weather maps, to analyse bird movements. It then uses AI and machine learning technology to predict when, where and how birds will migrate.
Another Cornell Lab creation is designed to recognise birds by their sounds and calls. It is aiding citizen scientists to sift through thousands of bird audio recordings for a library of songs.
Data collected from these and other AI-driven projects are helping scientists gain answers to vital questions which include the impact of climate change on birds and which species are declining in population. It is helping researchers to better understand, not only the health of birds, but ecosystems.
Growing reliance on AI is not without problems, however, one being AI-generated “nature photography.” The technology makes it easy to doctor photographs, producing fake images or giving misleading information, as happened with my friend searching for the bird of prey in The Salt Path and coming up with the wrong raptor, a bird that hunts fish along the coast and not birds in the sky.
The short history of AI has already thrown up a false image that initially did the rounds on social media as fact and now is circulating in an environment of ridicule. The 2023 picture was of the “Santa-cardinal”, a festive red-and-white bird perched against a snowy landscape. The bird – based on the American all-red cardinal – was later revealed as AI generated. It does not exist in nature.