Scrolling through social media, you may have dallied on reels of Leonardo DiCaprio dancing or Tom Cruise crooning, only to realize they’re spoofs created with artificial intelligence. Hyper-realistic videos and images like these — also called deepfakes — are notorious for celebrity pranking. But the technology has serious scientific applications, too. In the field of ecology, for example, AI doppelgängers of rare species could improve efforts to understand, monitor and protect them.

Specifically, wildlife deepfakes could help train AI models to detect wildlife in footage from satellites, planes and drones. Ecologists increasingly rely on such birds-eye imagery to study species behavior and population trends.

“We are truly in the age of big data when it comes to remote sensing in ecology and conservation,” says Dave Johnston, director of the Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “Over the past two decades, our ability to collect high-resolution remote-sensing imagery has grown exponentially, largely due to advances in drone technology and increased satellite capabilities.”