Leading UK Conservation Charity Warns of ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ Dangers Posed by AI Revolution - The Mammal Society
The Mammal Society has issued a statement to draw attention to risks posed to wildlife conservation by the escalating spread of AI tools.
The Society warns that while AI technologies can enhance data collection, analysis, and predictive modelling, their proliferation can also cause the damaging dissemination of scientific inaccuracies and misinformation about wildlife, while exerting a heavy toll on the planet due to high energy demands.
One of the key concerns highlighted by the Mammal Society is that using AI to facilitate large-scale biodiversity monitoring can introduce false positives into data, caused when a species is reported to be present in a sample when it isn’t. Even small numbers of false positives can cause extreme bias in population estimates which can be hugely detrimental in the context of monitoring rare or threatened species.
The Society also warns of inadvertent damage to conservation efforts and public education around life science caused by using AI image/video generation tools, and the reliance on AI to pull together information for search engines, news articles and academic papers. There is a danger that a ‘vicious cycle’ is created when AI generates, or mistakenly pulls in, inaccurate data or media to an article or piece of research and then this flawed text becomes a source for AI algorithms.
“We in the conservation sector are not Luddites and are already making good use of some of the amazing capabilities of AI in data analysis and wildlife surveying tools,” said Matt Larsen-Daw, CEO of the Mammal Society. “However, the potential implications of any new technology should be considered carefully before it is rolled out, so that issues can be foreseen and mitigated against. While AI tools can be a huge support to researchers and conservationists when used carefully and responsibly, the unprecedented proliferation of AI as a creator and curator of online information is creating a ticking time bomb that could prove to be disastrous to conservation efforts in the future."
Posted On: 10/12/2024
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