What we lose when we let AI automate our connection to the non-human world

Globe and Mail

10-05-2025

Marcel O'Gorman is a professor and the founding director of the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo.
As you read this, up to three billion birds are on a perilous journey to Canada. They will eschew the land of our southern neighbours, like many wary Canadians in these times, and build their own worlds here. During a time of escalating technopolitical power struggles on a global, these indefatigable cross-border travellers offer us many opportunities for reflection. Allow yourself the luxury of paying attention to them, especially as it happens to be World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD).
On WMBD in May, 2024, I was awakened by a riotous cacophony raining down from the trees at Point Pelee National Park. Nestled under wool blankets in a cozy oTENTiK, I reached for my phone and launched the Merlin app. Merlin, an AI-powered wizard conjured by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, features a sound ID function that can identify more than 1300 species of birds.
With my head resting comfortably on a pillow, I looked up at the screen and watched in awe as they manifested one by one: red-winged blackbird. Common yellowthroat. Yellow warbler. White-throated sparrow. Rose-breasted grosbeak. And so on. Without Merlin, I could probably only recognize two or three of the 20 or so birdsongs it had recognized. The app had turned me into a birding machine.
My collaborator Jen Clary-Lemon, also birding in bed, fetched the checklist we were given at the visitor centre. As we eagerly ticked the boxes next to bird species, a dark mood crept into the oTENTik. After all, we were cheating. There is something unsettling about birdwatching on an iPhone while glamping.
We decided that, instead of putting a check mark beside the birds we hadn't actually seen, we'd put an L for 'Listening.' This guilt-motivated gesture felt like a bad compromise, and we could sense the 'real' birdwatchers looking over our shoulders, tsk-tsking us from under their Tilley hats. In fact, we were not birdwatching at all. If anything, we were merely 'app watching.' In hindsight, all those L's are a trace of how it feels to be a Lazy birdwatcher, a birding Loser. But what exactly have we lost in the process?
I can't help but relate this experience to a tired old yarn by Plato, often dragged out by curmudgeons who bemoan the rise of a new technology. As the story goes, the deity Theuth (a bird-headed deity, nonetheless) presents King Thamus with the gift of writing. But Thamus refuses the invention and tells Theuth: 'You offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with.'
If Thamus refused the gift of writing because it externalizes memory, imagine what he would think of Merlin. Could it be that Merlin, to borrow a line from Nicholas Carr's bemoaning of Google, is 'making us stoopid'?
I confess that I have dragged out this Platonic tale for my own writing students during discussions of ChatGPT. AI can strip the presence of a human intelligence from the act of writing. It robs the reader of an intimate connection with the world of another human being: the writer. The same diminishment of presence can happen with bird-identification apps if we let AI automate our connection to the non-human world.
There are far worse techniques than AI to identify and count birds. In his short but smart book Bird, Erik Anderson paints an unassuming yet insidious picture of the amateur birder, 'a local gentleman, a true Victorian enthusiast, marching off through meadows, gun slung over his shoulder.' Indeed, collecting birds once meant quite literally killing them and preserving their skins for bragging rights, for financial gain, and only sometimes in the name of science.
The history of bird counting is ultimately a history of bird killing. In Sparrow Envy, the naturalist J. Drew Lanham sets out to amend the 'past transgressions of long ago dead and rotted bird watchers.' He is referring primarily to wealthy Victorian collectors who had a 'self-serving penchant for naming things after themselves.' To right this wrong, Dr. Lanham's 'feel guide' to birds includes a ceremony of renaming. Bachman's warbler, an extinct species, is recast as 'swamp cane warbler.' LeConte's sparrow becomes 'orange-faced' sparrow, and so on. He even calls into question the morbid collective noun for crows. There's 'no cause,' he writes, 'to criminalize the corvid kind.' No caws indeed.
On a recent visit to the Royal Ontario Museum, my collaborator and I were able to feel the history of bird collecting with all our senses, guided by the now-retired ornithologist and bird curator, Mark Peck. The basement of the ROM is home to more than 130,000 study skins of birds. The skins are stored in large wooden drawers that slide in and out of aging metal cabinets. This is a 'bird morgue,' my collaborator rightly affirmed.
Most of these specimens, which consist of the skin and feathers of birds stuffed with cotton, come from private collections and date back to the early 1800s. Many of them were collected during the Annual Christmas Bird Count, an event that began as an opportunity to shoot as many birds as possible before sitting down to a dinner of roasted goose.
As the aptly named Dr. Peck opened the first cabinet and slid out a wide, shallow drawer of Spruce Grouse, we were hit by a wave of scent more chemical than organic. It so happens that many of the older skins were preserved with arsenic soap, meaning the bird morgue could be fatal to birds and humans alike.
This specific drawer contained about 20 grouse laying on their backs, exposing the striking white barring on their chests. Like many other birds in these cabinets, the grouse were collateral damage from a scientific study.
As bird philosopher Vinciane Despret puts it, 'a great many experiments destined to establish in what way the presence of a living creature matters have failed to find any simpler way of doing so than by substituting presence with absence – a method which features in scientific literature under the watered-down name 'bird collections.''
What I felt standing before these grouse is of course not the same feeling I had in the tent at Point Pelee, gazing at a very different sort of bird collection on my iPhone. But the birds in the drawers, like the birds on Merlin, are at once present and not present. They are all birds become data, corresponding to the records in both Merlin's database and the bird morgue's antiquated card catalogue. AI-powered birding apps are merely an extension of this human tendency to quantify everything, to master it and make it intelligible on our own terms.
The way humans allow themselves to be present to the non-human world can make the difference between understanding a bird as a companion or as counted, as kin or as skin.
On the morning of Oct. 18, 2024, I hoisted my canoe onto my shoulders and made a short portage to the shore of the Speed River. It was World Migratory Bird Day, autumn version. The birds that arrived at Point Pelee six months ago were now on a gruelling journey back to the Southern Hemisphere. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology named the occasion 'Global Big Day,' as it did for the May event, in which 1.3 million people participated worldwide to report 7,725 different species in a single day.
I tried to repress the thoughts of Global Big Day as Global Big Data Day when I put my paddle in the water and glided west to the Blackbridge portage. At this time of year, birdsong is somewhat sparse on the Speed River. But as I made my way to the bridge, Merlin lit up frequently to the echoing whistle of northern cardinals, the jeering of blue jays, and the frequent 'conk-la-ree!' of red-winged blackbirds.
I stopped at Blackbridge to enter these very ordinary birds into my eBird checklist, then headed back toward Mill Pond, a big draw for shorebirds. Along the way, Merlin generated a list of what a real birder might call 'good birds': species I had not yet ticked off my list, including a golden-crowned kinglet, a northern flicker, a swamp sparrow, and a winter wren. I saw none of them, but Merlin heard them.
eBird tutorials suggest that it's acceptable to count a bird you have only heard and not seen. But with the Tilley hats still watching over my shoulder, I resisted this shortcut and allowed the 'good birds' to flit by like so many AI hallucinations. Instead, I parked my canoe near a mudflat where a predictable crew of ring-billed gulls, Killdeer, and Sandpipers had gathered. I counted them, entered them into the eBird app, and pointed the canoe toward home. I had done my duty. I had fed the digital Moloch of bird counting. The trip left me feeling empty inside.
On the way back, I spotted a large white bird standing in the reeds by the shore. This was a great egret, a bird I know without the help of Merlin. I have often sat in the canoe at a safe distance from these majestic creatures, trying not to scare them, satisfied simply to be in their presence and watch them fish. This rare opportunity to quietly and mutually observe a being very different from myself has been a source of great solace to me, a humble meditation.
The egret was aglow in the direct sunlight, and I was transfixed. But that day I felt something else: the tug of eBird was nagging me. 'Count it,' the app told me impatiently. 'Submit a photo. We have to feed the database!' As I reached for my iPhone, the egret let out a disdainful, prehistoric croak and took flight. I missed the shot.
Presence is a manifestation of attention. You are where your attention is. This is why a person might get upset if you look down at your phone during a conversation, an act that has led to the humorous portmanteau 'phubbing' (snubbing by phone).
As Vinciane Despret reminds us, making ourselves present to the more-than-human world must also be understood in terms of attention. Or as she puts it, ''giving your attention' to other beings and at the same time acknowledging the way other beings are themselves attentive. It is another way of acknowledging importance.' Is it possible that eBird is an inducement not for birdwatching but for bird phubbing? Did I phub the egret?
In spite of what Merlin, and science in general, confidently tell me about Ardea alba, it's what I don't know about the Great egret that captivates my attention. I am comfortable with the fact that the egret is a construct of my imagination, just as it is a construct of science, a construct of art, a construct of indigenous ways of knowing. Can you ever really know an Egret?
To be sure, collecting bird data with or without apps – to keep track of the avian population is a crucial part of a broad conservation effort that goes well beyond the wellbeing of birds. And I encourage everyone to take part in the Global Big Day.
But nature connection is one of those few aspects of human experience that advanced technologies simply cannot automate. So let's not lose sight of the version of conservation offered by J. Drew Lanham:
'Be the bird. See the miracle in each and every one of them. Conservation is the act of caring so intensely for something that you want only the best for its survival and future being. That intense care and love, is called conservation.'