My April of Birding - and - AI Generated Bird Images are Bad, MmmKay?
April is always a crazy time for me. My 9-5 job has a lot of important meetings that month every year, and I am usually shooting a theatrical performance or two. And, of course there are the birds! This is the time that many are showing up and moving through Ohio on their way North for Spring Migration. So I spend a lot of my free time hitting different spots around the area trying to capture images of migrants.
There have been a few first this year, including finally capturing an image of a Yellow Crowned Night Heron male in full breeding plumage at Gilmore Ponds near Hamilton, Ohio,
Male Yellow Crowned Night Heron in breeding plumage at Gilmore Ponds near Hamilton, Ohio
Also this year I finally managed to get some great images of Virginia Rail and Sora at Spring Valley Wildlife Reserve near Waynesville, Ohio. Both birds are usually very elusive and hidden from view in marshy underbrush. Both of them have very unique calls.
Warbler migration has also jumped into full swing, with a lot of warblers and songbird species already moving through my area.
Lots of other birds have also been moving into and through the area, with some of them being regulars here most of the year. Here are more bird images I’ve captured in April.
So April was a great Birding month for me, with May looking even more promising with my upcoming trips to Magee Marsh, Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, and a few other spots. Stay tuned for a blogpost to recap some of those images later in the month!
Now, time to talk about AI for a little bit.
I wrote a post last year about using AI when editing bird images, and for that I still think it is a useful tool. Some of the images I posted above, I used AI for removing a few errant branches or leaves, or fixing a background element. But the bird and the general overall content of the image has not been changed or made-up/created.
Recently I started noticing a few bird images on Instagram that just didn’t look quite right. I started to have suspicions that some Instagram accounts have been faking bird images entirely with Mid Journey or some other AI tool. I’m not posting links or calling any one account out, but the latest one I saw that was suspect was a Red-Tailed Hawk carrying a bunny in its talons that just didn’t look real. Or maybe, it looked too real.
So on a whim, never having used it before I decided to open up Adobe Firefly and play around with generating bird images with it. I have it as part of my Adobe subscription so I decided I may as well use it for a little experiment.
This image I shot a few mornings ago at Spring Valley Wildlife Area. It’s a Great Blue Heron taking off after having missed out on grabbing a fish.
REAL
I generated this image in Adobe Firefly with a prompt, trying to emulate my real image above.
FAKE
Scary, huh? No need to get up early, travel, and sit in the same place for possibly hours when you can write a prompt and make an image in 15 seconds, right? Well, no, not for me. But there are many unscrupulous people out there that would make it up in AI and then bold-faced lie about it. Now if I pixel peep I can see where the eye isn’t quite right, a few of the feathers aren’t right, etc. But posted on social media and absorbed by the masses that don’t know or care? It’s probably good enough to get away with.
How about another?
Here is my Yellow Crowned Night Heron shot that I showed earlier that I have been trying to get for years, and finally nailed it last weekend.
REAL
And here is a fake image I created in Firefly with a few seconds invested in a prompt and a little post editing.
FAKE
Mr. Mackey says its bad, Mmmkay
AI is now at the point where it can distinguish the different species of birds, even down to the prompt “in breeding plumage” and “male” version versus “female” version.
While I will continue to use AI in Photoshop for backgrounds, artifact removal, sharpening, etc - there is no way that I would condone someone doing this sort of “creativity” and then trying to pull it off as being a genuine image created from putting in the hours of hard work it takes to get the real thing. Doubt me that its happening? Just this morning on a Macro group that I belong to on Facebook there was a guy who had been posting AI-Generated images of spiders and bugs, and looking at them closely I could tell that they were generated using AI. When he was called out on it, he doubled-down on it and began to argue that they were real.
The truth is getting lost. It’s not just in politics and social discourse, its art and creativity that are being thrown into this world of make-believe.
It’s bad, Mmmkay.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
Do you have an opinion on what I wrote above? Please feel free to leave a comment below.
Jeremy