The recent year has seen the creation of large-scale generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems like GPT-4 and LaMDA, which are generating increasingly plausible outputs ranging from reasonable answers to questions, images of well-known people or situations, and convincing conversational exchanges. The most well-known language model, ChatGPT, is raising concerns across all scientific fields, leading to calls for its regulation (Hacker 2023). In this viewpoint, we explore how generative language models interact with the specificities of ecology’s epistemologies.

Simon James Goring*1¶, Kaitlin Stack Whitney2¶, Emilio M. Bruna3,4, Aerin L. Jacob⁵, Timothée Poisot⁶ ¹Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America ²Science, Technology, & Society Department, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States of America ³Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America ⁴Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America ⁵Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, Canmore, Alberta, Canada ⁶Département de Sciences Biologiques, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada *Corresponding Author E-mail: goring@wisc.edu (SG) ¶ These authors contributed equally to this work.