I feel this misframes my original post. I did not “ask a generative AI model to draw something” there. That was not what that particular thread was about. That was about AI upscalers. My initial intention there was just to take an existing actual observation and to increase resolution/sharpen.
This thread would be a more relevant thread to link to wrt to your comment and @adrien_ferrand’s original comment.
Text prompting a generative AI vs using an AI upscaler are very different kettles of fish in terms of user intent and in terms of input ( original image, not text ). Let’s not conflate the two.
I also disagree with your point though fwiw. I have drawn stuff from memory and unintentionally hallucinated minor detail in much the same way a generative AI would :
e.g. this drawing of a glowworm larvae from Greece I uploaded vs the photo of one I found later :
And, following your logic re:intentionality - if I saw something in an AI generated image that I knew was incorrect, I could then in theory just prompt the tool to remove said artefact.
I attempted this out of curiosity, using the text description from my above drawing upload as a prompt :
AI drawing of glowworm larva by chatGPT after 3 prompts:
In theory, I could carry on prompting to get it more in line with the description I have on my obs. I am not sure my drawing is much better than the AI drawing.
Worse, arguably.
Personally, I don’t really think drawings should count as hard evidence though.
( and I don’t think wholly AI generated images of things people saw based on text descriptions should be hard evidence either)
Upscaling an existing photograph as I did in the other thread referenced, is more complex - as there will always be a spectrum of how much you upscale / use AI to affect the original photo…and doubtless different tools use AI for upscaling in very different ways ( Topaz.ai ≠ Krea.ai ).
EDIT - perhaps in your comment @spiphany you are only talking about drawing in situ, as @tiwane states is a dividing line here … i’d missed @tiwane’s comment originally and didn’t realise that was a consideration when it comes to drawing uploads on iNat.
Still, one could in theory use an AI to generate an image in situ, with multiple prompts to refine…