The Daily Planet #98: The AI Bubble, Part 23

Culture has always been global, for stories, religious and philosophical beliefs, music and trinkets have traveled the globe for a millennia. However, print culture dramatically accelerated the spread of culture, and novels, radio and movies brought distant people into our lives.

How might AI expand our cultural circle?

The possibility that excites me most is the prospect of bringing non-human animals into our cultural universe. In today's Daily Planet, Elizabeth Kolbert explores the ambitious Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), a project aiming to decode the complex communication of sperm whales. Marine biologist David Gruber, intrigued by sperm whales' distinctive clicking patterns called codas, teamed up with computer scientists to apply machine learning in understanding these underwater conversations. The project is based in Dominica, where researchers use underwater microphones and attach recording devices to whales to collect vast amounts of acoustic data.

Sperm whales have intricate social structures, with females forming close-knit groups and males living more solitary lives. Their communication through codas--patterns of clicks varying in rhythm and number--resembles conversational exchanges. The CETI team believes these codas might represent a form of language, possibly exhibiting "duality of patterning," a key feature of human language where meaningless sounds combine to form meaningful units.

Despite the challenges, including the difficulty of tagging whales and the need for an enormous dataset of billions of clicks, the researchers have made progress. They have identified new signals and internal structures within codas, suggesting a richer communication system than previously thought. The project also plans to deploy listening stations to capture whale sounds over large ocean areas.

While the question of whether whales possess a language comparable to humans remains debated, CETI's work pushes the boundaries of interspecies communication. Ultimately, the project aspires not only to translate whale speech but to foster a new relationship between humans and the natural world, emphasizing mutual respect and conservation.

Can We Talk to Whales?