Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Used to Communicate With Animals, But Scientists Are Concerned

As scientists around the world employ artificial intelligence to communicate with elephants, bees, and whales, a breakthrough in interspecies communication has been made possible by technological advancements in AI. An expert cautions, though, that humans might abuse this power to negatively influence other species in the wild.

According to Karen Bakker of the University of British Columbia, a German research team is using artificial intelligence to decode patterns in nonhuman sound, like the low-frequency noises of elephants, and the waggle dance of honeybees, allowing the technology to not only communicate with but also control the wild animals.

Bakker explained that she also points out that the development raises ethical concerns. The AI technology that can speak to animals can be appended to robotic systems that can essentially break down the wall of interspecies communication.

Bakker wrote the book titled The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technologies Are Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, which was just published in the Princeton University Press.

Kinship or Dominion?

A stronger sense of kinship or a sense of dominance and the ability to control wild species which humans have never previously been able to domesticate could result from humans being able to communicate with other species.

The RoboBee was created in 2018 by researchers at the Dahlem Center for Machine Learning and Robotics in Germany. Bees use their waggle dance to communicate with one another.

The robot, which is made to resemble a sponge with wings and is fastened to a rod that regulates its movements, has nothing in common with a real bee.

The team trained the robot to imitate the waggle dance's movements, which include various airflow and vibration patterns, and it successfully fooled the bees into tuning it in.

The RoboBee gave some of the bees instructions on where to go inside the hive or to stop altogether.

Bakker said that German research will next involve placing several robots in various hives to determine whether the colony will acknowledge the machines as members of its own.

She continued by saying that the level of control over the hive by humans today is unprecedented. That hive has been effectively domesticated by humans in a way that has never been done before.

Ethical Conundrum

At this point, Bakker talks about the moral dilemmas that might result from this capability, pointing out that such technologies might encourage people to use animals for human exploitation.

She is, however, optimistic that the skills will be applied to enable the typical person to tune into nature's sounds.

According to the researchers, it will take a minimum of five years to complete the task of having the AI associate each sound with a particular context.

If the team is successful in achieving these objectives, creating and deploying an interactive chatbot that communicates with Sperm whales in the wild would be the next step.

Bakker points out that although humans have historically interacted with animals, particularly primates, they have done so in a manner that is "very human-centered," such as by teaching some animals sign language.

However, using AI enables communication in the creature's native tongue. To create the language, the technology examines distinctive signals connected to behaviors and patterns, Daily Mail reports.

Bakker explains in an interview with Vox that instead of attempting to teach those species the human language, the researchers are creating what amounts to signal dictionaries and then trying to comprehend what those signals mean to those species.