Cat Among the Penguins

The messy truth about saving nature

Biology Week special: Will AI protect nature or destroy it?

In our Biology Week 2026 special, we talk to Professor Anne Goodenough from the University of Gloucestershire about AI in conservation. She highlights exciting applications, and we also discuss the paradox of using environmentally-damaging technology to protect the environment. How bad is AI? Is its use justified to protect wildlife?

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

The Biology Week special is extra special because Becky organised the first Biology Week back in 2012. In the early days of Biology Week, Becky and Anne worked together collecting data from citizen science projects on flying ants and house spiders. It was great fun, and it is interesting to look back on how technology has changed our work since then.

Rebecca Nesbit Biology Week
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One response to “Biology Week special: Will AI protect nature or destroy it?”

  1. joewoodgate Avatar
    joewoodgate

    A very interesting and timely episode, thank you! It’s interesting that the applications that you and Prof Goodenough identify for AI are very much in the spirit of previous generations of automating technology: relieving humans of the drudge work that slows down the process of creativity.

    Trawling through hundreds or thousands of scientific papers, looking not for the headline discoveries but for useful methodological hints that the authors of those papers may not have considered very important; or looking at thousands of hours of video footage in search of the handful of frames in which something relevant is happening are not necessarily difficult tasks; but they are tasks that require immense patience and the ability to remain alert for very rare events, something that humans are extremely bad at, but that computers are ideally suited to. Handing these tasks over to AI allows small teams to do labour intensive analyses that previously required armies of people to attempt, and increases our chances of finding important but rare phenomena.

    What I find fascinating is that this is pretty much exactly opposite to the way AI has been marketed and gushed about by the credulous media. In that reading, AI is about to put us all out of a job, especially those in the creative industries (including science), and the only jobs left for us will be checking the AI’s output to catch “hallucinations” (you know, the sort of high volume, low hit-rate attention task that humans are awful at but computers do really well).

    By chance, just after I listened to this episode, I read an essay by Cory Doctorow that suggests one reason why we (and more importantly, our bosses) are being sold such a back-to-front vision of what AI is good for:
    https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/#theory-free

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