AI Can Now Identify Individual Geese, In What Some Are Calling The Most Boring Use Of AI Ever

AI has a lot of range. One second it's being used to help make a new Beatles song, other times it seems like an existential threat to humanity. Then before you know it's back to doing something completely mundane like figuring out how to identify geese.

According to NPR, Sonia Kleindorfer is the director of the Konrad Lorenz Research Center for Behavior and Cognition in Vienna, Austria. When she was interviewing for the gig someone told her story about the research center's namesake, Konrad Lorenz. He spent most of his career studying Greylag Geese. This probably made him a lot of fun to get cornered by at a party.

I'm sure there was a lot of geese talk.

Someone told Kleindorfer a story about the time some students gave Lorenz a gold plaque with a bunch of geese' faces on it.

"He went on to correctly name each goose," Kleindorfer said. "He made one error, and that was two sisters."

That's impressive... if you're into that kind of thing.

Lorenz's successor could do the same, but Kleindorger encountered a problem: she could only identify 5 or 6 geese before she had to throw in the towel.

AI To The Geese-Identifying Rescue

Now, most of us would say. "Who cares? Trying to identify all the birds on this stupid plaque is a waste of time."

Not Sonia Kleindorfer. She's got what you call "drive."

She enlisted the help of a colleague who miraculously had nothing else on their plate at the time. She had him develop an AI program that could identify geese based on their beaks.

That's far from the most useful use of AI I've ever heard, but do you know what it isn't going to do? Cause problems.

It won't put people out of work (except maybe professional geese identifiers if that's a thing). It's not going to lead to the inevitable AI uprising either. If and when that happens, no one is going to be heard lamenting, "Dammit, if we just hadn't put together that geese identifying program humanity might still have a chance..."

Nope. This program is just going to continue to tell geese apart with a 97% success rate. I mean, they could've just tagged the geese, right?

Oh well, tinkering with AI works too, I guess.

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