Four legs are enough

As we know, Coco is a dog, and one thing is clear: she has four legs like every dog, always. It may be that a dog is missing one, but an additional one is out of the question. And yet I recently saw a photo of Coco with five legs. Artificial intelligence had fabricated it. We know that by now. Additional hands, fingers or feet often appear in AI-generated or edited images. AI is inventive.

That's a problem. Sure, photos have always been retouched. People once had power over the lighting conditions and the framing of a photo in the darkroom. Prints were subsequently processed with brushes and paint, razor blades and chemicals. Later there were digital image editing programs, now the cell phone does it all by itself, and with AI, what was once image editing has taken on completely new dimensions.

AI not only edits images, but also creates its own. Soon no one knows what sight they can still believe. This not only leads to distrust of everything and everyone - and thus to fascism. It also has very direct consequences in everyday life. For “Citizen Science” projects, for example, in which laypeople collect animal sightings. Bird lovers, for example, enter their discoveries on the Internet portal Ornitho.de and, not least thanks to this data, scientists know where and when which bird species occurs. Sometimes species differ only slightly from each other. If the AI ​​simply replaces a color or invents a leg, or replaces the blurry photographed beak of a bird with a sharp but incorrect beak of another species from the database, this leads to scientific errors, as the journal Nature reported. The extent to which such databases are already contaminated is unknown. Ornitho.de urgently appeals to its users not to upload AI-edited images, but appeals alone are not enough. Because everyone knows this from their selfies: the line between optimizing and manipulating a photo is fluid and cell phones are increasingly deciding without even asking what they think is a good picture.

Hardly any animal on the planet is photographed as often as Coco - and admittedly, that's just me. We are therefore also familiar with image manipulation, because it starts with us, yes, Coco is involved in it even before the photo is taken. In 90 percent of the pictures, Coco is looking toward the camera, but in real life, 90 percent of the time her butt is facing me. I pay the dog with treats for posing and Coco is happy to deliver. So we are accomplices in this fraud matter. We don’t need image editing – and we certainly don’t need five legs.