AI-edited bird photos are contaminating citizen science databases with false species sightings

When a photographer asked an AI platform to make a picture of an epaulet oriole "look better," the tool helpfully added features from a red-winged blackbird, producing a false record of a species that had never been seen in that part of Brazil. The sighting went into the databases that scientists use to track habitat range and climate-driven migration shifts. Researchers publishing in Nature say hundreds of fake or AI-altered images have already been flagged on platforms like iNaturalist and the Macaulay Library — and those are just the ones caught.

The problem is less often outright hoaxes (a toucan in Siberia doesn't fool anyone) than routine touch-ups gone wrong: removing an obstructing branch, boosting color, sharpening detail. Generative models fill in missing pixels by drawing on training data that may include entirely different species. iNaturalist has flagged 1,400 suspect images out of more than 610 million — a number that reflects detection capacity more than actual prevalence. Ecologist Dr. Alexander Lees of Manchester Metropolitan University, who co-authored the Nature commentary, puts it plainly: "The idea that we could maybe use those photos to help us understand where species are in space and time is very difficult."