Tracking activity that's hidden by design.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. I admit it. On more than one occasion I have ragged on AI on this program.

Like pretty much any technology, generative artificial intelligence can be used for unsavory things.

But today we look at a positive use case by researchers at the

nonprofit Global Fishing Watch. They've spent years tracking human activity on the

oceans and there's a lot out there that has long flown under the radar

of monitoring systems.

That includes so-called dark fleets

involved in illegal and unregulated fishing. A new study published in the journal Nature

uses artificial intelligence to make a more accurate map of that activity.

That's according to David Crudesmont,

Director of Research and Innovation at Global Fishing Watch.

We produced the first ever global maps of fishing activity about five years ago using

transponders from vessels, vessels that broadcast their GPS positions.

That was really exciting.

However, there was a huge problem, which is we had no idea how many boats did not broadcast their positions, and we didn't know how much you were missing.

What we've done in this study is take satellite imagery and literally take pictures of the ocean at scale and count the boats.

And what we found really surprised us about three pictures the ocean at scale and count the boats.

And what we found really surprised us,

about three quarters of large fishing boats

were previously dark to our monitoring systems.

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