AI phone editors falsify scientific observations — eBird and iNaturalist introduce ban

🛡 AI phone editors falsify scientific observations — eBird and iNaturalist introduce ban

AI editors built into smartphones distort taxonomic features in photos of birds and animals. An article in Nature Ecology & Evolution shows a reproducible case: Google Gemini turned a Western Kingbird (Icterus cayanensis) into a Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus), creating a false record of an invasive species in Brazil.

🌍 The platforms eBird, Macaulay Library, and iNaturalist have introduced a ban on AI editing and automatic tagging of photos with the labels Artificial and Over-edited. On iNaturalist, 1,400 AI forgeries were found out of 610+ million records — the real scale is unknown.

👤 If you use the “enhance” features on your phone and upload photos to scientific platforms — your photos are now automatically marked and excluded from research.

Source 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03141-y Source 2: https://ebird.org/news/threat-of-ai-to-archives