Birdwatchers rejoice: did you miss a sighting of the passenger pigeon (extinct 1914) or dodo (extinct 1681)? Thanks to modern technology, you now have a chance to fill out your birdwatching catalog to 100%!

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Background:

Birdwatching is a hobby that appeals to many completionists who enjoy trying to see every possible bird.

The Issue:

Unfortunately, many species of bird have gone extinct. Some notable examples:

  • Elephant bird (Madagascar, extinct ~1000)
  • Moa (New Zealand, extinct ~1440)
  • Dodo (extinct 1681)
  • Passenger pigeon (extinct 1914)
  • The ivory-billed woodpecker (extinct 1987)

Fortunately, birdwatching as a hobby requires only two senses: sight and hearing.

Most birdwatchers do not consider it to be strictly necessary to touch, smell, or taste the bird in question: merely sighting it is sufficient.

Proposal:

Fortunately for us, machine learning is great at generating sounds and sights. It’s well within the capabilities of modern ML techniques to generate a plausible video of an extinct bird, complete with audio.

Thus, the modern-day birdwatcher can just sit at their computer, specify a prompt for their favorite type of bird (“weird looking bird, weird, fantastical, exotic, James Audubon style, bird illustration, white background, extra wings, extra feet, Trending on ArtStation”), and wait while the computer reconstructs it (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: These majestic birds and flying reptiles are ready to be watched!

Naturally, the computer is not limited to reconstructing actual extinct birds, so we could just forget about them entirely and create new bird-inspired creatures (Figure 2) for the purpose of filling out our birdwatching quota.

Fig. 2: The sky’s the limit when it comes to creating horrifying half-bird chimeras!

Conclusion:

The one remaining problem is that birdwatchers generally do not consider watching a video of a bird to be equivalent to having “watched” the bird. Here, we solve the problem by using augmented reality (AR) goggles to project the bird in three dimensions on top of whatever the user is looking at.

PROS: Increases employment in the birdwatching-industrial complex.

CONS: Purists might consider the AR goggles to be cheating, but who is to say which part of an “augmented reality“ image is real, and which part is computer-generated? Really, it could be either, so let’s definitely count that emu that we saw on top of the dishwasher as a “legitimate bird sighting.”