The internet peaked over a decade ago when bandwidth was alright for what we consumed and attention seekers have only infested mainstream media. You could navigate around them. Most forums have died since the early 2010s and you have to deal with these faking clowns even in the tidiest niches that we have left. People have become completely obsessed with attention and money. It‘s all the internet is good for anymore. At least if you ask most users.
Birders can be weird. Some can get very competitive, not surprised some would make fake images to pretend they saw some rare bird in an area they aren’t normally seem or something.
Pathological liars feel the need to lie and decieve unnecessarily and pointlessly at every twist and turn. AI is their new bread and butter. Ask them why they act the way they do, and they probably can’t even tell you.
There’s a weird level of brain rot going on with AI. My wife recently had some troubles trying to research who owned our home in the past (it was built in the 1880s); she posted to a local forum asking for some specific information about who & where they were buried and so on and was getting replies from somebody that were seemingly plausible but just had no basis in reality when she looked into it further. After pressing him several times for his sources the guy finally admitted it was ChatGPT.
Just… why the fuck? Why would anybody do that? They wasted not only my wife’s time but their own as well, they contributed nothing useful (and if anything, their “contribution” was purely negative).
At least in that case they could be stupid enough to think ChatGPT magically knows everything (lord knows a lot of people seem to think that) and be genuinely trying to help. I can kind of forgive being incredibly stupid and not realizing it if your intentions are good.
Posting fake bird photos requires making or pretending you made them. Either case is shitty.
It doesn’t. On a lot of phones you can just zoom in and the camera will use AI to fill in what it wants because of some “super zoom” (or similar) feature.
I could see sharpening a somewhat blurry but awesome photo (not enough time for exposure) as a valid enough reason.
But I think I wouldnt post it to a forum and just keep it to myself.
While it doesn’t know everything like that, its gotten very hard to make the pro models fail on freelance ai training sites, they only fail on roundabout logic like “on the year the cardinals won the superbowl, the state that the kicker is from, had a protest that year, what is the name of the winner of the golden globes for best actor year the leader of that protest died.” and it wouldnt fail at that probably.
It’s a chore to get it to fail on anything that could possibly have a source online (which is key here, you guys didn’t have a valid online source so it hallucinated, when making it fail for training you need to provide an answer with sources to show the AI is failing)
Outright hoaxes remain rare and are often easy to spot, said Lees – nobody is falling for a toucan sighting in Siberia – but he says birders often use AI to edit and improve an image, and the algorithm can then introduce parts from different bird species to create the new image.
My phone offers an “AI enhance” option after you take a photo. Mostly it tweaks the framing and colours, but it can also do some surprising things and produce a quite different image from the original. I played with it a bit when I first got the phone, and I saw it change people’s eye colour, turn their head to face a different way, and add extra strings to musical instruments. So I don’t use it, but it sounds like the problem is mostly people using AI image enhancers like that carelessly.
Idiots who want to generate nanoseconds’ worth of free fleeting internet clout, I suppose. And here’s me who can’t even be bothered to edit my bird photos before posting them.
It’s so ridiculous and unnecessary too. I’ve gone out and identified such beautiful birds, nature in general is so varied yet very often vibrant. It’s a hobby that really does not need any alteration to what you see: birds are very pretty!
The very popular app ebird has leaderboards, that alone pushes lying and exaggeration. Obviously I am not saying everyone is cheating, just that some are. I would personally bin such fripperies.
Feedback loops on more general wildlife social media also pushes a very different expectation of what is a good photograph and what is a hard bird to photograph/find.
If you chasing clout from that audience then its putting ever more pressure on to get ever closer, higher framed shots of the most photogenic birds, AI (re)generation to chase that becomes inevitable for those without morals
Who the fuck bothers to post fake images on birding websites?
The whole fucking point of birding is enjoying seeing the birds. Taking photos of birds is difficult and satisfying.
Posting fake bird photos is fucking stupid.
The internet peaked over a decade ago when bandwidth was alright for what we consumed and attention seekers have only infested mainstream media. You could navigate around them. Most forums have died since the early 2010s and you have to deal with these faking clowns even in the tidiest niches that we have left. People have become completely obsessed with attention and money. It‘s all the internet is good for anymore. At least if you ask most users.
Birders can be weird. Some can get very competitive, not surprised some would make fake images to pretend they saw some rare bird in an area they aren’t normally seem or something.
Pathological liars feel the need to lie and decieve unnecessarily and pointlessly at every twist and turn. AI is their new bread and butter. Ask them why they act the way they do, and they probably can’t even tell you.
There’s a weird level of brain rot going on with AI. My wife recently had some troubles trying to research who owned our home in the past (it was built in the 1880s); she posted to a local forum asking for some specific information about who & where they were buried and so on and was getting replies from somebody that were seemingly plausible but just had no basis in reality when she looked into it further. After pressing him several times for his sources the guy finally admitted it was ChatGPT.
Just… why the fuck? Why would anybody do that? They wasted not only my wife’s time but their own as well, they contributed nothing useful (and if anything, their “contribution” was purely negative).
It’s baffling behavior.
At least in that case they could be stupid enough to think ChatGPT magically knows everything (lord knows a lot of people seem to think that) and be genuinely trying to help. I can kind of forgive being incredibly stupid and not realizing it if your intentions are good.
Posting fake bird photos requires making or pretending you made them. Either case is shitty.
It doesn’t. On a lot of phones you can just zoom in and the camera will use AI to fill in what it wants because of some “super zoom” (or similar) feature.
That is in to way comparable.
This isnt a Samsung moon monent lmao
It’s different, but very similar. AI will just fill in what it doesn’t know with something that it does know.
Really it’s kind of worse than the moon photos. At least that is what the moon would actually look like.
The mental illness in that case is a photo hobbyist thinking, “I should have been able to take that picture; AI is just helping me.”
To me it is exactly related to “i should be able to answer that forum supporr question. AI is just helping me.”
I could see sharpening a somewhat blurry but awesome photo (not enough time for exposure) as a valid enough reason.
But I think I wouldnt post it to a forum and just keep it to myself.
While it doesn’t know everything like that, its gotten very hard to make the pro models fail on freelance ai training sites, they only fail on roundabout logic like “on the year the cardinals won the superbowl, the state that the kicker is from, had a protest that year, what is the name of the winner of the golden globes for best actor year the leader of that protest died.” and it wouldnt fail at that probably.
It’s a chore to get it to fail on anything that could possibly have a source online (which is key here, you guys didn’t have a valid online source so it hallucinated, when making it fail for training you need to provide an answer with sources to show the AI is failing)
My phone offers an “AI enhance” option after you take a photo. Mostly it tweaks the framing and colours, but it can also do some surprising things and produce a quite different image from the original. I played with it a bit when I first got the phone, and I saw it change people’s eye colour, turn their head to face a different way, and add extra strings to musical instruments. So I don’t use it, but it sounds like the problem is mostly people using AI image enhancers like that carelessly.
But everyone must think I’ve seen the rare Chicken-footed Cock-warbler or they won’t think I’m cool!
Nobody thought you were cool for your cock-warbling!
They thought you were cool for being interested in something!
Idiots who want to generate nanoseconds’ worth of free fleeting internet clout, I suppose. And here’s me who can’t even be bothered to edit my bird photos before posting them.
It’s so ridiculous and unnecessary too. I’ve gone out and identified such beautiful birds, nature in general is so varied yet very often vibrant. It’s a hobby that really does not need any alteration to what you see: birds are very pretty!
Reminds me of people making up stuff on fully anonymous image boards like 4chan just to get some replies. Pathetic.
Yeah but that’s the point of 4chan
Like marathons there is an entire population of people who ‘cheat’ in something that has no real consequence except to talk themselves up.
The very popular app ebird has leaderboards, that alone pushes lying and exaggeration. Obviously I am not saying everyone is cheating, just that some are. I would personally bin such fripperies.
Feedback loops on more general wildlife social media also pushes a very different expectation of what is a good photograph and what is a hard bird to photograph/find.
If you chasing clout from that audience then its putting ever more pressure on to get ever closer, higher framed shots of the most photogenic birds, AI (re)generation to chase that becomes inevitable for those without morals