AI-Edited Photos Are Polluting Citizen Science: Gemini Gave a Heron a Third Leg
kscottz · x · 2026-08-18
The eBird and Macaulay Library teams warn that citizen-science projects like eBird, iNaturalist and the Macaulay Library are seeing a rapid uptick in AI-manipulated and AI-generated photos, a threat recently highlighted in a Nature paper.
The problem is worse than it looks: a user's photo edited by Google Gemini to "improve" quality gave a Green Heron a third leg; more subtly, AI fabricates false feather detail to make images appear sharper. Many phones and editing apps now apply AI processing by default with no way to disable it, so people may not even realize their photos are altered. This erodes the scientific value of the archives, and the teams ask participants not to submit AI-edited or generated images.
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