From Alan Lamoreau, seen on Bsky:
Oh! A neat goose hybrid posted to "What's this Bird?’ but when you zoom in on the photos the bill details have been too manipulated by Al photo editing to be accurately assessed for which species may be involved.
Scroll on... A cool-looking Red-tailed Hawk that someone is wondering which subspecies it might be - right up my alley! But when you zoom in on the photos literally every feather group has been so heavily manipulated and altered by #Al editing that it's impossible to determine subspecies because the photo is essentially fake now; just a mashup of whatever Al thinks parts of a Red-tail
should look like.
Scroll on... WOW! That's a remarkable trail cam photo of a Bobcat! It almost looks like a painting... but the head looks oddly small... hmmmm. After some prodding the original photo is produced and sure enough it had been so heavily altered by Al ‘post processing’ that the photo posted was essentially a digital mock-up with totally different proportions and fur markings. No longer the photo off the trail cam; it may as well have just been ‘created’ by Al from scratch.
This stuff is killing me. My days on social media are becoming very limited. We can't even trust simple, everyday photos of animals to be real. The wildlife community needs to quit editing with Al, and we need to start calling out photographers that are using it. Our reality is being destroyed all
around us.
