Use of AI upscaling

The AI influence on that Vermillion Flycatcher photo significantly changes the gestalt of the face and bill to look more like a corvid than that of a flycatcher. After the change it looks to me almost like the body of a flycatcher with the head of a Canada Jay photoshopped on and the colours swapped to make it look consistent. The lighting is also very weird and looks like a low quality field guide illustration or something. Given all that, it doesn’t look like a real bird and clearly has strong AI influence to me. I think I’d be appalled to come across that while identifying and mark it as no evidence of organism. There’s no way to tell whether or not it was created completely from scratch with AI.

However I’m much more familiar with the vibe/gestalt of birds than with any other taxon; if you did this with a unfamiliar species of butterfly or a dragonfly there’s a good chance I’d be fooled.

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