SoCal Birding Generative AI Stance

We'd like to state our official stance: SoCal Birding is against the use of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) for bird photography, bird identification, educational resources, and other wildlife content.

As a wildlife-focused organization, we find it imperative to help educate the public about generative AI, particularly with regard to its effects on the environment and the potential ethical concerns that arise from relying on AI for accurate information.

We want to make sure everyone has access to the information they need to make well-informed decisions for themselves. To accomplish this, our team has drafted up a short document explaining the reasoning behind our stance, which provides citations for further reading if you would like to better understand how generative AI works and the impacts it has.

Link to the full document.

GenAI refers to any model of artificial intelligence which uses machine learning to generate novel responses to prompts using pattern-recognition from a set of training data. Examples include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and X’s Grok.