How a Portland nonprofit is using artificial intelligence to help save whales, giraffes, zebras

To the untrained eye, zebras in Kenya probably all look alike. But each animal's black and white markings are like a fingerprint, distinct -- and invaluable for scientists who need to track the animals and information about them, including their births, deaths, health and migration patterns. Traditionally, getting this kind of information has been an invasive and labor-intensive process. But breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing of photos of individual animals are beginning to change the conservation game. Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit Wild Me has developed AI to pick out identifying markers -- the stripes on a zebra, the spots on a giraffe, the contours of a flukewhale's fin -- and catalog animals much faster than a human can.