When AI is being touted as the latest tool to replace writers, filmmakers, and other creative talent it can be a bit depressing staring down the barrel of a future dystopia — especially since most LLMs just parrot their training data and aren’t actually creative. But AI can have some legitimate strengths when it’s taken under wing as an assistant rather than an outright replacement.
For example [Aarav] is happy as a lark when birdwatching, but the birds aren’t always around and it can sometimes be a bit of a wild goose chase waiting hours for them to show up. To help him with that he built this machine learning tool to help alert him to the presence of birds.
The small device is based on a Raspberry Pi 5 with an AI hat nested on top, and uses a wide-angle camera to keep an eagle-eyed lookout of a space like a garden or forest. It runs a few scripts in Python leveraging the OpenCV library, which is a widely available machine learning tool that allows users to easily interact with image recognition. When perched to view an outdoor area, it sends out an email notification to the user’s phone when it detects bird activity so that they can join the action swiftly if they happen to be doing other things at the time. The system also logs hourly bird-counts and creates a daily graph, helping users identify peak bird-watching times.
Right now the system can only detect the presence of birds in general, but he hopes to build future versions that can identify birds with more specificity, perhaps down to the species. Identifying birds by vision is certainly one viable way of going about this process, but one of our other favorite bird-watching tools was demonstrated by [Benn Jordan] which uses similar hardware but listens for bird calls rather than looking for the birds with a vision-based system.
Frigate now has a bird id option, and Cornell’s merlin app is astoundingly good at recognizing calls. A tiny mic linked back to a phone would continuously identify and track birds in realtime
In theory you can use same principles to spot small war drones in real time and shot them with a robotic shotgun I suppose.
sir, this is a Wendy’s
Then Wendy’s can sell that product to Waffle House.
I’m not American, the only thing I know about Waffle House is that people go there to fight for some reason.
The line for waffles can get quite long, which results in tempers getting short.
AI powered guns. What could possibly go wrong…
Ask Sarah, I’ve heard she’s has some experience there….
You mean Miss Connor?
What could possible go well as well ?
I mean my camera identified a small twig as a cedar waxwing with 98% confidence, so I’m not sure if I’d want it to be armed.
Birds are all just government drones anyway
I hear some birds are privately owned.
I hear others are owned by pirates.
Building an RC bird.
To fly over ‘birds aren’t real’ jokers.
I love the Cornel app but it repeatedly identified a neighbour’s Maine Coon cat as a barn owl so I lost a bit of confidence in its accuracy
Reinforcing the owl-pussycat connection, they’re cats with wings.
I need to try the Cornell app to test my own bird tweeting. I don’t use X.
Maybe your neighbour’s “cat” is actually a barn owl in disguise?
Recognizer trained on birds tries to identify whatever it sees as a bird. The shape matches the closest to that of a barn owl.
Try Seek by iNaturalist, it is pretty good for many animals, plants, and fungi.
I have a container running BirdNet on my server which takes the audio feed from my IP cameras and runs call identification. It’s fairly good. Would probably do a lot better with a better microphone though.
This is an LLM that just parrots its training data and isn’t actually creative, or I am missing something… ?
I think you’re missing that the purpose of that sentence was the pun…
Perhaps I should put a heart rate monitor on my (indoor) cat. At elevated pulse rates, the device could send me a text or email, alerting me to something potentially interesting. Either a cat with the zoomies, or a cat on the windowsill watching something tasty looking outside…