Will AI Let Us Talk To Animals?

In this episode, we explore a fascinating, if not widely discussed, application of AI: understanding and potentially communicating with animals. While it may not drastically change our daily lives like some AI applications, it presents a unique opportunity to connect with the animal kingdom on a deeper level.

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Why are we trying to talk to animals?

The motivation behind this pursuit is multifaceted:

Scientific Curiosity: Humans have always been fascinated by animal behaviour and communication. We seek a better understanding of the world around us, and animal communication is a key area we've yet to unlock.
Breaking Down the Human-Animal Divide: By understanding how animals communicate and the emotions they express, we can move away from the idea of humans as completely distinct from other species.
Spiritual Motivation: Humans are uniquely conscious, and understanding how other animals perceive the world could be incredibly insightful. It might offer fresh perspectives on life's big questions.
Conservation Efforts: Understanding how animals perceive their environments could help with conservation efforts. This could reconnect us with nature and help preserve a variety of species.

A Brief History of Studying Animal Communication

Humans have long been interested in animal communication, with early accounts even appearing in the Bible. More scientific approaches began in the 1800s with Charles Darwin studying the emotional expressions of animals. In the 1960s, studies of dolphin vocalisations revealed complex clicks and whistles used for communication. However, in the 1970s, philosopher Thomas Nagel suggested that understanding animal experience was futile because we are limited by our human perspective. But now, we are exploring whether computers and AI can bridge that gap.

How AI Translates Languages

AI-powered machine translation has taken a new approach. Instead of relying on explicit rules of grammar like we do when learning languages in school, AI is trained on massive amounts of data, allowing it to infer rules and patterns on its own. This deep learning technique has led to the development of large language models.

Embedding Spaces: Words are mapped into a “galaxy" of meanings where words with similar meanings are close together. These embedding spaces reveal that relationships between words (e.g. king to man, queen to woman) are consistent across languages. By aligning these “galaxies" we can translate between languages.

Applying AI to Animal Communication

The same principles behind AI-powered language translation can also be applied to animal communication. We aim to create a “galaxy" of animal sounds, where the position of a sound corresponds to its meaning or sentiment. AI may help to align these animal galaxies with the human language galaxy.

Challenges

There are several challenges we must overcome before we can achieve this goal:

Lack of Data: There's a massive disparity in the amount of data available for human languages versus animal communication. We need to collect more high-quality data.
Context: We need to understand the context of animal sounds, observing their behaviours and emotions along with their vocalisations. This will help us to 'ground' their communications.
The Cocktail Party Problem: It can be difficult to isolate individual animal sounds in environments with lots of background noise. Fortunately, AI is helping solve this problem.

Current Projects

Several exciting projects are underway using AI to understand animal communication:

Project CETI: This non-profit is gathering large amounts of data to decode whale communication.
The Earth Species Project: This group is focused on decoding the communication of other species.

Ethical Considerations

If we could talk to animals, several ethical issues must be addressed:

Validating AI: How can we be sure that our AI translator is accurately interpreting animal communications?
Complexity: Some animals may not have a complex language capacity, making some back-and-forth conversations difficult.
Misuse of Technology: There is the potential for misuse with playback experiments or by poachers using synthesised mating calls to lure animals.
Privacy: The technology to extract individual animal sounds may have potential human espionage uses.

The Future

If we could talk to animals, what would it mean?

It may bring us closer to animals, fostering respect for their environments.
It may bring a different perspective on life, which may be inspiring.

This technology has the potential to help in conservation, improve animal welfare, and give us a better understanding of the world. We hope this episode has given you a lot to think about!

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