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.