Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s transition plan for Donald Trump includes a laundry list of wishes for the next four years of federal governing — namely, opening up more lands for oil and mining development, roads and logging.
It also comes with something else: a pair of sinister-looking bird-like figures gracing the otherwise-idyllic wilderness scene on the report’s cover page.
The two figures are dwarfed by a more regularly proportioned bear and moose that appear next to a lake and cabin beneath craggy mountain peaks.
But a few eagle-eyed observers noticed the strange avian forms — which drew some bemusement and laughter along with a little derision from those with ornithological expertise.
“I asked some of our most knowledgeable and esteemed birders and biologists to identify those birds, and their scientific, postdoctoral response was: ‘What the hell are those?’” said Mr. Whitekeys, the musician and entertainer who is also board president of the Anchorage Audubon Society. “I’m guessing that this is AI, and somebody asked AI to generate a picture with a mountain, a moose, a bear, a lake, a cabin and two piles of bear poop.”
A closer look at the AI image in Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s “Alaska Priorities For Federal Transition” report. (Office of the Governor)
Whitekeys, who stressed that he was speaking solely for himself and not the Audubon Society, is at least partially correct: A spokesperson for Dunleavy, Jeff Turner, said he checked with a contract attorney involved in the report’s creation and that “the image was generated using ChatGPT” — a reference to one of the most popular AI chatbots.
Turner did not respond when asked to share the prompt that generated the image.
Asked about the origins of what, to a reporter, appeared to be satanic ducks, Craig Richards, the contract attorney, said the terms of his agreement with the state barred him from discussing his work without gubernatorial approval.
“I would love to talk about ducks,” said Richards, a former Alaska attorney general. “But that is what my contract provides.”
The image is the latest example of AI-generated errors sneaking into official business — both at the state and national levels. Earlier this year, the Alaska Beacon revealed that a proposed cellphone policy drafted by the state’s education commissioner had depended on AI and included citations of studies that don’t exist.
More famously, a former Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, unwittingly gave his own lawyer legal citations that didn’t exist; instead, they were generated by Google’s AI assistant.
AI assistants are “great tools,” but all of them rely on “some proofing,” said Kenrick Mock, an artificial intelligence expert and dean of the University of Alaska Anchorage’s engineering college.
“We’ve seen several instances of this with text-generated documents, where if they’re not proofed, they might not have things that exist in reality — even if you want them to,” he said.
The Alaska bird images provoked a range of responses when posted to Northern Journal’s social media accounts.
One person said it evoked the Loch Ness Monster — if it lived beneath the surface of Wonder Lake inside Denali National Park and Preserve.
“Please tell me this is at least coming from the free version” of AI software, said another.
Whitekeys, the musician and birder, said he observed clear shadows on the righthand sides of the moose and bear but, strangely, less so next to the waterfowl. He cheekily suggested that that’s consistent with a “vampire grebe” — grebes are a species of diving bird — that don’t cast shadows at all.
“Vampire grebes or satanic vampire grebes — it’s a subspecies,” he said. “You know, they’re probably there because both Mike Dunleavy and Donald Trump are committed to saving endangered species. And those are probably the only two birds on the face of the earth of that species left.”
Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government.
