I’m sitting in a small boat in Shark Bay, Australia, eavesdropping on a conversation between some of Earth’s most intelligent beings. The motor is off, the turquoise sea is glassy, and Stephanie King and I are motionless, transfixed by the whistles, clicks and squeezy, whirring noises made by the dolphins swimming below us. If anyone could tell me what these big-brained social mammals are saying, it would be her.
Based at the University of Bristol, she co-leads Shark Bay Dolphin Research, one of the longest-running wild dolphin research projects in the world. She has spent thousands of hours watching and listening to this population. Like most other animal behaviorists, King is increasingly integrating artificial intelligence into her research process.
But when I ask her if AI will someday allow us to “speak dolphin”, she stiffens a little. Dolphins communicate, navigate and find food using buzzes, pops, whistles and other acoustic signals. These sounds were recorded in Shark Bay, western Australia via an underwater microphone by Amy Martin for the podcast Threshold The problem, King says, is not AI itself, but the narrative being built around it.
She sees her field increasingly framed as a quest for an AI-assisted animal interpreter, with headlines declaring that we’ve almost “cracked the secret language” of various creatures or are about to “decode animals’ speech”. There are even cash prizes for breakthroughs, including the Coller Dolittle Challenge, which seeks an algorithm for communicating with non-human organisms. She believes the allure of tech dollars and media attention is priming the pump of research in some unhealthy ways – nudging scientists to make premature claims about AI-assisted findings, and encouraging them to describe their work in sensational terms.
What we know, in many cases, is in fact very little. Sound itself likely means something different to dolphins than it does to us. They can detect pitches far outside our range of hearing, they process acoustic information much faster than we do, and our sensory systems are wired differently in important ways.
For example, both humans and dolphins can echolate – or use sound to navigate – but dolphins process echolocation information in the part of the brain connected to touch, while for us, it’s more connected to vision. In other words, instead of “seeing” with sound, dolphins might be hear-feeling, or feel-hearing, their way through their watery world. Whatever that experience is, it may be fundamentally inaccessible to us – and it’s not something we can comprehend by plugging their whistles and squeaks into a large language model.
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