“AI” is a pretty bad blanket term. BirdNet / Merlin is a model trained specifically on bird calls (and some noises) built to recognize bird calls. App and logo use huge general-purpose models to create content of questionable quality.

And yes, a decent birder should never trust just Merlin ID.

This reminds me of “bugoga” from the olden days.

(Circa 2007 on bashorgru, there was a meme about writing “bugoga” into a text file, renaming it to exe and then running it. That made the cursor jump around the console and if you had a connected matrix printer, it would start going crazy - something about writing spaces to all available output in an endless loop)

Someone I know got screwed over when 3G shut down. Their business used an alarm system with a 3G modem (using a cheap data-only SIM card).

The “updated” version requires subscriptions, an app, and goes through manufacturer’s servers, so more expensive, and several more points of failure.