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Posted by arnemunthekaas 1 day ago

Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations(github.com)
See also: Avian Visitors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343424 - May 2026 (20 comments)
1804 points | 218 commentspage 10
taysdafu 7 hours ago|
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Belkins 1 day ago||
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neenjdkddi 22 hours ago||
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rydersel 23 hours ago||
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thegpot 1 day ago||
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gabzofar 1 day ago||
That's a blatant copy of https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/, please.
thesurlydev 1 day ago||
Very cool!

I can't help wonder what this would look like for humans. Imagine, set one of these up at a party and it has the means to identify anyone on the invite list. When it hears the person it displays a photo, brief bio, and relationship status.

dmitrij 1 day ago||
We could also leave fake images aside, go outside and try to watch the birds ourselves. Maybe even let the camera inside, just looking with our own eyes. Real nature. No intermediate.
RobinL 1 day ago||
> Half the point of this project is showing off some amazing public-domain natural-history illustrations. Over 800 cut-outs covering more than 400 species, every one taken from a real plate and hand-curated for this project (no art is AI-generated, though some has been retouched with AI).
stetrain 1 day ago|||
You can in fact both have an interesting bird-based art display in your home and also go outside and watch birds yourself. Neither precludes the other.
bottled_poe 14 hours ago|||
The next logical step is to have speakers for the backyard to simulate the wildlife that no longer exists.
zabriel_goss 1 day ago|||
An app like this would be used as augmentation rather than simulation.
world2vec 1 day ago|||
I do recommend a decent pair of binoculars and the Merlin Bird ID app.
stronglikedan 1 day ago|||
Or both. Why limit yourself?
ninefathom 1 day ago||
While I love this idea generally, the scope of the use of generative AI for artwork is too vague for my comfort.

The README.md mentions that "no art is AI-generated, though some has been retouched with AI." Superficially, that sounds mild. Some of the other closely-related projects, however, use different verbiage, or none at all.

For those of us with ethical concerns around generative AI application to artwork, much more detail may be needed before we could decide if this was appropriate for us.

arnemunthekaas 22 hours ago||
Author here: Fair, i could've been more explicit in my writing. Concretely:

Every bird is a cutout from a real scanned 1800s plate (Gould, the von Wright brothers, Dresser...). The manifest (https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme/blob/main/assets/a...) links to each source, so you can compare them to the original scans. No bird has been prompt/diffusion generated, although I did use diffusion-based tools to remove birds from the perches (https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme/tree/main/assets/a...).

Nothing at runtime uses AI either, at least in the sense of LLMs or diffusion. The collage is Pillow and numpy, and detection is BirdNET, which is a classifier, not a generative model.

However I have used LLMs for code-related work, and for writing scripts for programatically editing the images, like cutting, contrast and colour corrections.

jrflo 1 day ago|||
What is the ethical concern in this use case?
hirako2000 1 day ago|||
Could be for the montage. Is that unfair to say no AI generated the arts, but that AI put individual pieces together?
zkmon 20 hours ago|
Finally, we solved the problem of converting bird sounds into their pictures without involving human cognition. The great problem and the need had to wait for the great, ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI technology to appear on the horizon. AI is such a good technology that continue to solve many such great problems that humans desperately needed for their survival and progress. All at the a minimal cost of some effect on the climate, which may only slightly quicken the human extinction.

Puzzlingly, no animal species requires AI, which is a mystery that need to be solved by AI.

iambenm 20 hours ago||
Hmm. The project uses BirdNET-Go, which does inference locally on a Raspberry Pi. Then it looks up the species against a set of already existing illustrations. So in this case it seems like the "ultra expensive, data-center-driven AI" is not really involved in the core loop of this project.
zkmon 20 hours ago||
The local inference is a product that came out of the data-center-driven AI.
dansitu 20 hours ago|||
This is incorrect; the local model is a small dense neural network called BirdNET that would not have been referred to "AI" when it was published in 2021. The model outputs a bird species probability distribution and the web application displays an existing image file of the most probable bird on the screen. This is a lovely example of simple, offline, and fun project using a straightforward machine learning model.
zkmon 18 hours ago||
Ok, so why didn't this small dense model come up, say, 10 years back? Oh it needed all the AI evolution and concepts that were powered and evolved inside the data centers. But we still want to claim that it has nothing to do with the Big AI.
tossandthrow 20 hours ago||||
What a shame that we get a bird ckassifier by the samle technology we use to recognize cancer and other illnesses.
zkmon 18 hours ago||
What a shame that you use that excuse to offset all other evils of AI, without even having a hint of how many patients were saved by AI. Just like how oil salesmen and nukes makers say that they solve some great problem of the world.
40four 16 hours ago||||
Incorrect. As others have pointed out, BirdNet is a “traditional” neural network. The amount of compute needed to train something like this is many orders of magnitude less than an LLM. Something like this could be trained on local hardware with enough juice, or by renting a handful of GPU’s
zzzeek 20 hours ago|||
> came out of the data-center-driven

should we tell them how hacker news gets onto their computer?

zkmon 18 hours ago||
You assume that I assume that HN doesn't require data centers?
rcpt 18 hours ago|||
Amazingly unhinged response to the automated bird picture frame.
efavdb 20 hours ago||
Do you not like AI?
zkmon 20 hours ago||
Well, it's not a fruit or food that I can eat. It's not a shelter, It's not a fellow human or a pet. So, hard to say if I like it.