Talking to Animals
AI-mediated conversations with non-humans are a long way off. But LLM-assisted projects with dolphins are a breakthrough nonetheless.
Imagine you’re walking down the street when you encounter an extraterrestrial. In one of its weird appendages it holds out a very cool looking gaming console – alien, yes, but comprehensible and deeply fascinating, as if it were the Nintendo Switch 5 or something. You’d love t play with it. At the same time a box on the alien’s thorax emits a word-like sound. “Dwerg!”
You’re a smart primate. After a couple of go-rounds you think to say “Dwerg!” And the alien hands you the toy. Communication established!
This is one of the strategies being used with DolphinGemma, a new Google DeepMind tool that uses AI to try for a shared “vocabulary” that dolphins and humans could communicate with some day.
In this work, the “extraterrestrials” are humans, hanging out in the oceanic world of the dolphins. A human researcher holds up something dolphins like to play with, like seagrass or a scarf. Her onboard AI…