this field biologist does a great job highlighting the insidiousness of AI editing

these one-click AI edit buttons are incredibly appealing to many photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, and are framed as innocuous

this is worth sharing and educating people about

December 15, 2025 - 02:21 UTC

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Imagine a new subspecies being discovered and lost because AI manipulated the photo to look like everything else. It's such a glaring flaw in all AI - if all it can do is remix input how will it ever generate genuinely new output? Where do new ideas come from then?
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Call me crazy, but I can’t figure out what was wrong with “Mother Nature’s” version?

It’s that “Trump disease” that is spreading everywhere.

They want Praise and accolades and will do just about anything to get more.
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I think there a still a few posters with integrity
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We need to relentlessly bully photographers who use this stuff.
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Shaming works
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I saw this photo before seeing this post today and my first thought was "Why is it so yellow? I've never seen a snow leopard with such yellow fur around its head" And I don't want to point fingers just yet, but maybe this is the reason.
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Seconding what Paris said: this is an Amur leopard (Panthera pardus, subsp. orientalis). Unlike snow leopards (Panthera uncia) they are a true leopard, belonging to the same species as those found in Africa and India. Hence the yellow coat.
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I think that’s actually an Amur leopard - an endangered leopard population from eastern Siberia / northern China!

(Though I guess that‘s just another point as to the misinformation… the response to unfamiliar sights understandably becoming “probably AId” dismissal instead of research.)
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remembering a bit in a Star Wars novel where it turns out long-range images are post-processed with a "best guess" filter and someone is successfully able to fool an enemy into thinking they are flying towards a whole damn hostile fleet just by filling an area with strategically-placed debris
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Ok, but which star wars novel because I have read that scene and my brain is not providing the title. Although its thinking Wraith Squadron shenanigans
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@sal46.bsky.social lol 😄
There are many engineering lessons in the Star Wars universe honestly
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They do this in Gundam too, due to Minovsky interference from mobile suits scanners on ships tend to be useless, so they have to rely on line-of-sight. This makes dummy inflatable suits and asteroids loaded with explosives extremely useful.
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like this example here is literally that bad; it's not even the same fucking cat between the top and bottom images

close enough to pass a cursory inspection, maybe, but that's how AI rolls - "close enough is good enough" despite it being, y'know, NOT in a lot of cases it's shoved into use for
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Also wondering if we run the risk of the environment seeming healthier than it actually is.
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Btw if you just got the new iOS don’t forget to turn off “scene detection” in your camera settings if you don’t want every picture you take to have this done to it automatically
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Hey, that looks like my cat.
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I've been really frustrated by this recently with my iPhone pictures that are automatically adding AI smoothing/sharpening to anything that's slightly out of focus. So before where info could be cleaned from a blurry pic, now it's just useless.
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*gleaned
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This is so disheartening. The AI basically turnt the bobcat into a bobcat/european wildcat/lynx mashup. This AI shit could become a serious problem when it comes to accurately access a species population.
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It slimmed down the bobcat... Wtf...
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changed the eye shape too.
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@gabirota.bsky.social
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@gorka.bsky.social is this real
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I don't know why, but it feels like Ai thought the bobcat was too fat and made it skinnier on purpose. I have been sad at all the fake cat videos I keep seeing because that was the best thing about the internet and now half of them are fake.
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AI has no place in any kind of accurate documentation.

Quite frankly AI being used for any involvement in nature documentary disgusts me.
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I've been saying this about photography for the longest time now, that I can never really enjoy an image the way I used to, due to not knowing if it's been digitally edited or not. Death of REAL appreciation of photography came with Photoshop.
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On these images, Ai recreated the american bobcat into a european one (smaller, not reddish).
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So is AI-editing permanently intergrated into my phone camera with no way to turn it off? If so, fucking hell
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Yes and no. Tech companies have started to cram AI-features in their photo apps, but they also started calling every algorithmic feature in their products "AI" to fluff their stocks. So, some of what your phone calls "AI" could very well be just your run-in-the-mill sharpening/contrast filter.
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"Bobcat": short for "Robert Catherine"!
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Autocorrect / smart edit is such a concept (even pre-AI casual photog features). You used to have to proofread and mistakes were marked off, but now the 'autopolish' (with all its inherent weaknesses) is becoming more built in. Everything is getting worse.
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Grok please make this bobcat look like the tigers from Zootopia
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"Head looks oddly small"
"Totally different proportions/fur markings"
I'm just saying, there is a non-zero percent chance the AI had been trained on a bunch of furry art and then tried to adjust the animal based on it :/
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The head proportions and also the muzzle look more like a house cat than a bobcat
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Check you phone camera settings after every update and turn off automatic AI "enhancement" if it has been switched on again.
Goes for "AI assistants" in a number of other apps too.
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do you happen to know how to find the settings?

I've literally been unable to take photos of people with my normal camera app without it editing the image weirdly and I cannot find it in the camera or gallery settings
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As a paleontologist I've had field photos of material ruined by post processing. My google pixel tried to interpolate detail on fossil close ups, resulting in a swirling mess on close inspection. A good smart phone camera can be incredibly handy in the field, but now I use the dumbest one I can.
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Sounds like we need to reduce non-essential tech after all. If we keep messing up civilization with pollution and plastic garbage we'll get there anyway.
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this is heartbreaking to read. those photos are precious. thank you for sharing!
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And piror to use I thought I disabled Ai shenanigans, but the post processing is baked into its hardware (evidently a feature of its CPU). Raw images help, but I don't trust it in science now.
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If AI touched up the photo, then AI took the photo.
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What I don't understand is what is this FOR? Phones have automatic brightness/color correction already, why does it have to generate new detail too?
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noise reduction and detail "recreation" is another area of the software phone cameras use that went from being older algorithms or whatever to seemingly gen-ai. the amount of photos i've taken where small text in the mid- to back- ground straight up looks like genai text is astounding
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Watch your next camera update, my most recent one buried those options & replaced them with the AI enhancement shit.
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It's like that episode of Friends where Joey discovers the Thesaurus feature on the computer and literally replaces every of a letter with bigger words he doesn't necessarily understand much less understand if they're appropriate in that context.
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Monica: Alright, what was this sentence originally?

Joey: Oh, ‘They are warm, nice, people with big hearts’.

Chandler: And that became ‘they are humid prepossessing Homo Sapiens with full sized aortic pumps...?

Topped off by him even altering his own name to be "Baby Kangaroo Tribbiani.
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Did they yassify the face and body of that poor bobcat? It would be funny if it didn't alter how people perceive the natural world. The unnatural smile these filters put on animals is a sure tell of an altered image.
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Am I imagining it, or did it make the bobcat... thinner?
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It looks like the AI went “that’s a cat” and turned it into a big housecat.
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The tragedy of people who don't notice a difference between quality and slop thinking there's no actual difference.
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It's like artist renditions of lions before most people had seen one, or the elephant as described by 5 blind guys.
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With this amazing new technology, we're killing nature even faster!..

..to generate fake pictures of nature 🤦‍♂️

Can silicon valley be over now. Can firefighters and teachers be the ones making millions yet. This year sucks
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Yes, we need to stop all these fake jobs. Jobs are for practical purposes only, anything else is a cool or destructive hobby.
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We should be building things that heal, not just distract.
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Wish my phone wouldn't do it automatically, there's not been a way to turn it off and whatever I take a shot of, never looks the same as through the viewfinder.

My old digital cameras do a much better job really, even the cheap ones.
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Doing my bit of wildlife photography, I just have no idea what the motivation is? Bird photography for me is a physical act, the joy of tracking motion and on-the-fly adjustment to the machine. I’m more excited to have the 2nd than the 1st because it captures that tension between body and camera
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I like these pictures. Would say something more intelligent about them, I just... that's it, me likey birb pichur.
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But man is that egret full of air or what!? Nice.
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I've seen a composition rule of always have your subject touching 3 sides of your canvas and the second pic definitely follows it!
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It gave the bobcat a tummy tuck.
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Alot of phones default camera apps use this awful auto filter denoise thing when taking photos . If you zoom it it looks like soup. Id rather some noise if i can still tell its a photo of a bird
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this is why i shoot mostly analog black and white film
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I can't get into the headspace of someone who gets that shot off a trail cam and decides to post something that looks like a Skyrim screenshot instead
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Not the trail cameras but the complaints about bird photos are probably people using their phone cameras. Digital zoom uses gen-AI directly. The camera app itself is an AI editor.
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Any time I edit a photo on my camera to clip out just the part I want to keep, if it's below some threshold, it asks me if I want to "keep it this resolution" or make it fake bigger. Absolutely ridiculous. Gives people a very false understanding of what the device can actually DO.
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:/

Bring back analog cameras and stop training evil AI?
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It's not even a click. My phone does it automatically. This photo looks like a painting but was taken in my back yard.
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Out of interest what is the advertised resolution of your phone camera? I think with most of them they're probably only like a 12MP sensor that is then being upscaled to shit so that they can advertise a 50MP camera
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Yeah, I've noticed that the "AI enhancement" is opt in by default a lot of times and you have to turn it off manually.
It should be the other way around.
Nature photos after 2023 or so will have to be cross referenced with photos pre-2023 now, or outright discarded as useless for research/ID-ing.
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What the actual heck?
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we're not going to able to trust anything we don't see ourselves, and we're going to constantly doubt even that

seems like a great way to make a whole lot of people accept anything that their chosen authority tells them is true despite evidence of its falsehood right before their eyes
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the original photo is also just better than the AI edited one. the colors and details are more vibrant. why the fuck did they mess with that photo?
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I'm pretty sure my phone camera AI processes fine detail automatically without my doing anything but take the photo, unless I am making the effort to force it to .raw, and I'm not even sure that works in my current versioning. It's incredibly frustrating. I WANT THE DETAILS I SAW.
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I'm increasingly considering going back to film and prints for anything that matters even at the point-and-shoot tier, because it's the only way to get detail preservation.
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Is this the only way to identify AI manipulated photos - one by one? ugggg
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A nugget of gold in the sewer of silicon valley clowns who pump endless shit about how good AI is. Thank you.
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I mean he said in the post what's going to happen. Eventually even the most naive individual will learn over the years not to trust social media and at that point it turns into the same situation as email/phone spam.
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Already happened to me. Nothing is real on social media, image sites, etc. Only trusted individual sources exist, and those get corrupted too.
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Another thing might happen: people get so used to the way AI editing looks it becomes a preference & they reject real photography as "flawed" or "unfinished".

Similar to how airbrushing models created unrealistic/unachievable beauty standards & renewed interesting 50-step daily makeup routines.
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AI is making people dumber.
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AI is the perfect tool for the Ministry of Truth.
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I can't really imagine a PROPER professional photographer using shit like this.
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Photos that are generated or altered with AI need to be marked as such by the AI algorithm itself. This must be a legal requirement to be part of all AI systems.
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"AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations" -Cory Doctorow.
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no need for ai watermarks, just the telling release date
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It totally changes the body language of the animal, too. The bobcat in the original pic looks alert, intently focused on something just out of the frame, and ready to react. The ai pic has all the liveliness of a bad taxidermy job.
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I returned a top-of-the line Samsung phone because it made this kind of extreme "sharpening" a default. The only alternative was using RAW images and editing them to look vaguely natural. All phone cameras overprocess images to an extent, but the Samsung was egregious.
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I don't have the option to do the same and it has been hell to use this damn camera. There's a famous piece of art literally right out my window and I have never been able to take a photo of it to show anyone because Samsung sensors aren't sensitive to the fuckin wavelengths. How!?!? Hate this thing
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One like a small lion and one like a large tabby. Hmmm
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Instead of moving forward, we're regressing back to the middle ages.
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"The photo is essentially fake now"

That's a deep cut right there
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25 years ago, I proudly brought the portfolio of portraits I did of my pet birds over Spring Break to class.
The professors critique: "I know critters... that's not how a parrot's head is shaped". Nothing else. No comment on line work or shading or...

I hope she's retired so she doesn't see this.
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imagine how fucking unwell you have to be to go around thinking "i can make it better than real"
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You don't have to be unwell, you just have to be naive and not educated on the subject

That's the whole problem. Most people are both of those things most of the time about most subjects.
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@louiswitter.com sur tes questions d'IA et photos
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Someone tell Mark Cuban.
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Tho he probably prefers fake animals.
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In photo processing I only use AI for subject or sky masking and for denoising, which I use very sparingly.

I want my photos to reflect a piece of reality. Sometimes that means fixing blown highlights in the sky, but it never involves changing a cat's stripes!
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Far out, this is depressing - as a person with a brain and as a photographer. There's a reason I insist on lugging around my DSLR and lenses, I suppose.
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Cascade IV: The NeuroPsyche War
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It’s eerie how much this particular brand of AI misinfo has permeated online. Unless you carefully curate your search engines, you can’t guarantee a picture of something is ACTUALLY a picture of something and not a “better than real” fantasy pushed by corpos that want you to give up on reality.
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Not to mention it discourages people from truly connecting with and trying to understand the natural world. Why do we need wildcats to be edited into housecats to make them more appealing to us? Can’t we appreciate a wild animal as it is?
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They Disneyfied the face - it’s SMILING

The nose is even shorter.
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The AI processed Bobcat photo is essentially ruined because it's taking too much from domestic cats in its dataset that it scrunches the Bobcat's face to unrealistic proportions
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It’s maddening. I don’t know why people use it at all especially for this. It is an abomination of how beautiful real life is.
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Everything is so fake, no wonder mental health is crashing.

Natural creatures (homo sapiens) in an unnatural "box."
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And to think they wanna use this shit for law enforcement.
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I've been doing photography professionally since 2019, trust me when I say that editing is a handicraft you have to learn by hand, because otherwise you won't develop your own style nor ever learn to expand your skills. I see the allure of one-click editing but it's not worth the skill deterioration
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A lot of photographers have no ethical concerns about doing crazy cakes with the lighting to the point where it's effectively not even the same scene. And deep edits to insert and remove people are a thing. Or to make someone thin, or, or, or.

The demand for a lie is there.
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I had a theory once that becoming fake really kicked off for ordinary people with the start of silent film. Makeup, then plastic surgery, then abuse of ozempic. And everything. Now we have AI. We're going to become androids if we don't stop.

[Bonus] Some posts are here:
bsky.app/hashtag/WaronEntertainmentIndustry
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Image you shoot a photo like this and then are to lazy to fiddle a little with the situation and color grading sliders.
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It gets worse. The moment the camera knows I exist, they start editing the wildcat to be blue colored. It's weird.
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The actual photo is perfectly fine. The "refined" photo looks like cheap motel art trying not to be cheap motel art
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JFC, it even made the cat "smile", it's so pathetic.
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I loathe IA. The creepy, fake factor is repugnant.
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100% agree.
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Wtf was wrong with the original photo? Like why did it need to be processed with ai in the first place??
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This is particularly depressing just because the original trail photo likes fine to me, great even! I don't know why someone would even feel that it needs "touching up"
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likes = looks
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What is very dangerous is that I, a non photographer or field biologist, can't tell the difference. The top one just looks a bit brighter. It also wouldn't have occurred to me that someone would use AI to alter it. These become easily normalised to the unsuspecting!
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worse: I can't switch off the AI processing tool on my new phone camera, it's always enhancing with some sort of HDR
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Everything is fake now just as AI bros wanted…
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You should throw a fucking beach party!

Yes! Yes, it is...
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i've just made sure to go and turn off the "scene optimizer" setting in my camera.
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I'm not against the usage of supervised algorithms but we need a framework to prevent all the irresponsible usage we're seeing.

We should unionize to organize against management trying to replace us.
Governments need to regulate their power consumption.
Everyone needs to stop distorting reality.
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