From Truth to Fake: The Threat of AI to Media Archives - eBird

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Do Green Herons (Butorides virescens) have three legs? No! But Google’s Gemini AI seems to think so. It altered this actual photo submitted to an eBird checklist.

Community-driven science projects such as eBird, the Macaulay Library, and iNaturalist are seeing a rapid uptick in AI-manipulated and AI-generated photos. A new publication in Nature has recently highlighted the threat of AI photos to these projects, leading to some popular news articles. We want to raise awareness and inform the community of how AI reduces the scientific value of photos.

The Problem

AI is increasingly being pushed into our daily lives—nearly every updated piece of technology and your favorite applications have added various forms of AI, some optional and some unavoidable. Use of AI can add or remove details from images, changing your image into something that does not represent what the bird actually looked like while birding. This can be extreme, as in the case of the Green Heron where a third leg was added, or be more subtle, such as creating false feather detail to make a picture appear sharper. Even more troubling, many people may not even realize the extent of changes that AI is making to their photos, since they may just appear “better”, clearer, and sharper at first glance. Furthermore, many phones and editing applications have changed to using AI for photo processing, often without your knowledge and with no option to disable it.

The following example is from a recent Nature article discussing this problem. When the original image of the Epaulet Oriole (image B) was edited by Gemini 3 to ‘improve’ its quality, it resulted in C) an image that almost perfectly resembles a different extralimital species which is not in the same genus—the Red-winged Blackbird—and would be expected to fool both expert ornithologists and computer vision image classifiers.

An example of large language model image generation and manipulation from a recent Nature article: “Citizen science platforms must mitigate against the threat of generative AI” (Lees et al. 2026). A) Image produced with Gemini 3 (Google) using the prompt “Produce a photo-realistic image of a male Red-winged Blackbird, facing left sat on a thin lichen-covered branch as viewed from below as if taken with a 500 mm telephoto lens from a distance of 100 m. The bird is holding its tail down. The sky behind is bright blue.” This image is a convincing representation of a Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus (a common North American species) which has no obvious signs of being a ‘deepfake’ image – although it looks like it may have fewer than the expected 12 tail feathers. B) Image from the Macaulay Library (ML597448011) of an Epaulet Oriole Icterus cayanensis, a South American rainforest species, taken in Amazonian Brazil (photographer David Theobald). C) Manipulated image of ML597448011 produced with Gemini 3 (Google) using the prompt ‘make this look better’.

Why This Matters

The Macaulay Library aims to document the natural world through digital media for scientific studies and future research and applications, and as such photos submitted to it through eBird are considered a record of where and when species occur, their behavior, what they look like, and the habitat they occur in. AI-introduced changes alter that natural truth, eroding the credibility of the ML archive among other birders and the scientific community.

Policy Overview

Use of AI to generate or alter photos submitted to eBird checklists and Macaulay Library is strictly prohibited. For photos you are submitting to eBird checklists, don’t use AI to process them and avoid using AI-powered tools within your preferred photo editing software. This might include buttons/tools like “Improve”, “Upgrade”, “Enhance”, or “Generate” in common photo editors. Also, be aware that some newer phones will automatically use AI to sharpen very zoomed-in photos.

DON’T:

Don’t put AI-manipulated photos into eBird checklists.

Don’t use AI chatbots or generative AI tools to “enhance” or “improve” photos for your eBird checklists.

Don’t overuse AI-powered editing tools on photos you upload to eBird; avoid using them at all when possible.

Don’t use AI to generate images of what you thought you saw as documentation in an eBird checklist.

DO:

Do keep your photos as natural as possible.

Do retain the original metadata for your photos when editing and exporting.

Do describe what you saw with words, especially if you didn’t get a photo.

Read our full AI policy. Individuals repeatedly found to be uploading AI-generated or significantly altered images may have their accounts set to Not Public.

What is eBird and the Macaulay Library doing to help?

In the coming weeks, tags will be added to photos, video, and audio submitted to the Macaulay Library through eBird that are found to be AI-manipulated or over-edited. These tags will help...