How smart are smart bird optics? I tried to fool them – but failed

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AI is apparently coming for everything. Cameras can now recognize subjects before you've even decided what you're photographing, phones can remove strangers from the background of your vacation photos and apparently even spotting scopes are getting clever.

But just how smart are these so-called smart birding optics? Having spent a month with the GoBirding Vision Master APL-ETF-M1 , I decided there was only one scientifically rigorous way to find out: try to make it identify something that wasn't actually a bird.

The Vision Master is a seriously clever bit of kit. It's a smart AI spotting scope that can recognize real birds through its built-in identification system, with more than 1,500 species available directly on the device and even more when connected to the GoBirding app.

In normal use you simply press the AI button, position your feathered subject inside the red box that appears on-screen, and within a few seconds it'll tell you what you're looking at. That's all very impressive, but naturally my next thought was: what happens if I cheat?

So I went hunting for fake birds. Not particularly convincing fake birds, either. I tried cuddly toys, teddy birds and various artificial bird-shaped objects that, to a human being from a reasonable distance, could at least vaguely pass for something with wings.

I even recruited a seagull-shaped figure that my own daughter made out of paper plates while at kindergarten for the experiment. Surely, I thought, somewhere inside all that clever AI was an algorithm just waiting to see a beak, two wings and roughly the correct silhouette before confidently announcing that my dog's toy was a herring gull.

Nope.

Again and again, I put my fake feathered army in front of the Vision Master, pressed the AI identification button and waited for my triumphant "gotcha" moment. It never arrived!

The scope simply wasn't interested. Teddy bird? No. Cuddly seagull? Nope. Artificial bird scarer? Still no. I repositioned them, changed angles and generally behaved like someone who had suddenly developed a worrying obsession with proving that a stuffed animal was wildlife. The Vision Master refused to play along.

Rather embarrassingly, the only thing successfully fooled during this experiment was me. What impressed me is that the Vision Master clearly isn't just searching for something vaguely bird-shaped before throwing a species name onto the screen.

There appears to be considerably more happening behind the scenes, analyzing enough visual information to distinguish an actual bird from the sort of thing you'd find in a pet shop or hanging above somebody's vegetable patch.

Of course, this isn't an ISO-certified scientific examination of artificial intelligence. My testing equipment consisted largely of toys and an unreasonable determination to catch the Vision Master making a mistake.

But it does demonstrate why AI identification inside smart optics could become genuinely useful rather than simply another feature that manufacturers can print on a box. When I pointed the Vision Master toward actual birds during my month of testing, identification was impressively fast. When I deliberately pointed it toward impostors, it knew something wasn't right.

And that's perhaps the biggest compliment I can give it. I went into this little experiment hoping for a funny photograph of the GoBirding Vision Master confidently identifying a stuffed seagull as some exotic coastal species. Instead, I came away even more impressed by the technology.

Smart birding optics are still relatively new, and I'm sure somebody, somewhere, will eventually find something ridiculous enough to confuse one. But after spending far too much time waving fake birds in front of the GoBirding Vision Master, I'm admitting defeat.

The birds were fake. The intelligence apparently wasn't!.

Read the Review

If you've enjoyed this slightly weird experiment and want to learn more about this AI spotting scope, I highly recommend taking a look at our full GoBirding Vision Master review for more details