Comment on AI-altered images on birdwatching forums putting research at risk
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz 14 hours ago
Users can create high-quality fake images in seconds – or enhance a photograph by asking the AI to remove a branch or leaf that might be obscuring part of the subject, which can inadvertently introduce significant changes.
Using AI even to edit a photo turns it into a piece of fiction; better to either accept a degree of imperfection or just take a few pictures and pick one’s favorite.
plantfanatic@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
Arguably human editing is the same, why even make a distinction?
anon6789@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I appreciate when the photographer is forthright with it being an edit if they remove a branch/leaf/blade of grass, especially if they still share the original.
Any post processing is altering the original, and anything AI can do to a photo was done by hand in the past, including adding or removing subjects. I agree with you it doesn’t so much matter the method of alternation, it’s still the person presenting the image that is responsible for its credibility.
I also agree with the article that people uploading data to a crowdsourcing platform that is used by people trying to legitimately track animals to protect them is poisoning the well for people that are trying to do important work. A ton of resource is poorly funded, and having reliable volunteers is priceless. If people start throwing in made up datapoints, that takes a toll on real organisms. But then do you limit who can contribute, potentially excluding crucial photos? It just makes things a mess for everyone if people start becoming dishonest.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 12 hours ago
Depends on what kind of editing, really. Brightening, cropping, rotating, etc. an image is part of the art creation process; adding or removing objects is falsifying reality. Doesn’t matter if AI is involved or not.
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
Because AI edits are far easier and quicker for most people than Photoshop, with the end result being worsened by slop generated in the gap left behind.
plantfanatic@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
But Ai can also do it “correctly”, and humans can also do a terrible photoshop job, you need to be skilled to be able to use it correctly. It also has a host of automated correction tools, which is indistinguishable from Ai.
Ai isn’t the problem with this issue, it’s the editing itself.
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
Human editing is a problem too, but AI is making the edits more commonplace and harder to notice. Any policy changes should therefore bar both types of editing, but AI edits are a far greater threat because one doesn’t need to be skilled to make them.
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 12 hours ago
Using AI for de-noising and upscaling is pretty normal these days.
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 9 hours ago
And that’s terrible. Imagine seeing a detail in a picture of a bird taken with off-the-shelf components and not being able to know whether that detail was hallucinated by denoising software. Unless that image is accompanied by the full weights of the specific AI version that did the operation as well as the random seed used for its stochastic elements, there is no way to double-check.
There isn’t even a guarantee that these modifications will be uniform. What’s stopping an oh-so-helpful postprocessing software engineer from using AI vision to determine what the objects of the image are and then handing that information over to the upscaling algorithm to fill the detail with context-dependent hallucinations? Like, if the AI thinks it’s looking at a bird, it’ll fill the space with generic bird feather texture that might not fit to the bird in question at all.
So you couldn’t even come up with an ad-hoc postprocessing step that replaces AI slop with noise because the AI slop is trying camouflage itself as realistic. The only scientific option is to nuke all data about how the image looks below a certain level of detail, effectively blurring it until the AI slop is invisible. This is way worse than whatever sort of blurriness the AI is trying to correct.
And using AI to redraw part of the image is even worse. You can’t even blur the image to the point you’re sure there are no hallucinations, the entire image is a fiction inspired by the image that hit the camera, which is now lost. Features at any scale could be made up, the result of the AI hallucinating something in place of an obstruction.
rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
When a human edits a photo, there are artistic decisions being made, even for someone who’s never used a photo editor before. When AI does it, it’s slop. The human can attempt to recreate unique things they saw in the bird. AI makes up whatever without reason or thought.
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz 10 hours ago
Not that I disagree about AI outputting slop that doesn’t match reality, but when the images are needed for scientific purposes, people shouldn’t be trying to ‘recreate’ anything—whether themselves or with AI—but instead take photographs with that content there in the first place.