researchers warned that hundreds of fake images have already been discovered on popular databases for recording species. They said that the true scale of the issue is unknown – as many could go undetected – and could contaminate records collected by the public.

Biological recording citizen-science platforms receive millions of images, sounds and video; these data increasingly underpin our knowledge about where species occur in space and time and how they behave. However, their utility may be compromised if databases become appreciably contaminated by media produced by generative text-to-image machine-learning models, and potentially lead to spurious ecological inferences.

Humanity’s knowledge is being destroyed. Guard your pre-2020 datasets I guess.