The promise of artificial intelligence is vast and ambitious, but this recent project even caught us by surprise. A multidisciplinary team of scientists from around the world are attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks and talk back to them. Started in March 2020 under the name Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), this project is trying to decode how animals communicate and communicate back to them.
The theory stems from advances in natural language processing, a branch of AI that deals with the automated analysis of written and spoken speech. So far, the AI has just been trained on human language. But, the question becomes, what if these efforts were turned to animal communication?
There are some fundamental questions to answer here. Do animals have language at all? This is a topic of major debate amongst biologists and often descends to the semantic debate about what language is. There is no doubt that animals communicate, but do they speak? Some recent studies suggest that they might. One study found Siberian jays, a type of bird, have a vocabulary of about 25 calls, some of which have fixed meaning. In 2016, Japanese researchers published findings on another bird, the great tit, that showed basic grammatical structures.
The project’s name CETI invokes SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which has has scanned the sky since the 1960s and Is yet to find a single radio signal. These efforts could be similarly futile. However, if these scientist are able to decode animal communication and even communicate back, it will be one of the most profound shifts in how we engage with our environment in human history. It will also be a sign that the age of artificial intelligence has well and truly arrived.
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