It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. My partner Steve and I were in Sydney, wandering about King’s Cross, when he spied a sign for ‘All You Can Eat Breakfast – Only $6!’
His eyes popped out of his skull. Entranced, he stared at the sign, but unfortunately kept on walking – smack into a concrete lamp post.
“Ow!”
He wasn’t injured, just grumpy. I laughed so much it became a sort of agonised writhing. It still makes me laugh to think about. Sorry Steve.
Some signs, some pictures are just too alluring to ignore.
This week I saw an incredible photograph of ‘Waiheke’s baby kiwi’, shared on Facebook.
To capture this mesmerizing eye-level shot the photographer must have had to lie in leaf litter with a long lens, a miraculous beam of light bathing the sweet little bird in a golden glow. Awwwww!
The word ‘News’ floated on the kiwi’s back on a cloud of red.
Suddenly I smelled a rodent. Why haven’t other media (so desperate for clicks) picked up such a striking photo? I squinted to check the news outlet.
‘New Zealand Brand’?
I’d been had. I had walked into the proverbial lamp post. It was fake. The accompanying post was mostly hashtags, and lacked any of the detail of a real story, crediting the baby bird to ‘predator control and community care’. Unlike stories by Radio New Zealand, Gulf News and The New Zealand Herald, there was no interview, no mention of the groups involved – Save the Kiwi, Te Korowai o Waiheke, Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, the Department of Conservation, volunteers, the landowners from Ponui and Waiheke.
Why is ‘AI slop’ like this so damaging? Let me count the ways.
By not mentioning even one of these groups, the post diminished their mahi, their stature, and their ability to fundraise, and made repopulating Waiheke with kiwi look easier than it really is. The post was cute, digestible and reassuring. It also contained errors, hard to spot at first, unless you know anything about kiwis.
“For the first time ever” it read, “a baby North Island brown kiwi has hatched on Waiheke Island – a historic moment for conservation in Aotearoa!”
Genuine reportage had made it clear that the chick is the first born to kiwi recently introduced to Waiheke; not the “first ever”.
During the Last Glacial Maximum 17,000 years ago, sea levels were at least 100 metres lower than they are today. Waiheke was a rumpled knob surrounded by a plain, not an island, and would likely have been home to plenty of kiwi.
When I sent the fake photo of the kiwi to a zoologist, he responded, “Ugh that’s gross. AI is particularly bad at making baby birds; it generates some hellish mishmash of a chick and an adult.”
As I’m not a zoologist, the photograph fooled me. It won my click.
In the online world, media which generates strong emotions – even if its ‘OMG, cuteness overload!’ – rules.
By exploiting work paid for by serious news outlets, they draw our attention away from them. This not only drowns out important detail and context, it makes these outlets less desirable for advertisers, their main source of income.
To get clicks with fewer working journalists, online news is becoming more polarised, more simplistic and more sensational.
It is becoming harder to tell what is real, and what isn’t.
And that is a huge problem.
As the media scholar Dr Ethan Zuckerman pointed out, “With the embrace of AI video generation for political gain [most recently by Donald Trump], it is likely that soon a major election will be influenced by imaginary imagery.”
When people share reassuring stories about the environment created by AI chatbots, they might imagine that they are somehow helping the environment. They aren’t.
Human journalists are covering the social and environmental costs of AI. ‘From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy. As tech companies build data centers worldwide to advance artificial intelligence, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages’ is one of the more recent, published in the New York Times last month.
“By 2035,” the paper reports, “data centres globally are projected to use about as much electricity as India, the world’s most populous country, according to the International Energy Agency. A single data centre can also use more than 500,000 gallons of water a day, nearly as much as an Olympic-size swimming pool.”
Why are so many online fake stories about the environment so soothing, so tranquilising? Who could that benefit?
In this dreamy utopia, baby kiwi frolic on beaches, the homeless are housed in gleaming designer pods, sleek machines solve climate change and fly us to cocktail bars in the sky. Everything is clean and everyone is happy and the sky is gold, in that perfect moment just before the sun sets.
And we walk into a lamp post.
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
