AI's Role in Decoding Animal Communication

AI could unlock new ways to understand and communicate with animals, bridging the gap between species.

### Bridging the Gap: Understanding Animal Communication through AI
* 🌍 The African savannah uniquely juxtaposes urban life with wilderness, as exemplified by **Nairobi's skyline in the distance** while **wild rhinos roam nearby**.
* 🐾 As human populations expand, wildlife increasingly shares their habitats, leading to **complex interactions that remain largely misunderstood**.
* 🦛 Artificial intelligence is emerging as a tool to **decode the intricate communications among various species**, revealing their **complex interactions**.
* 🐕 Cash, a dog using a button board to communicate, showcases the **potential for understanding animal emotions**, although interpretations remain **debated among researchers**.
* 🧠 The Earth Species Project aims to **decode nonhuman communication** using AI, drawing parallels to the **Rosetta Stone's role** in understanding human languages.
* 📊 AI, particularly through Transformers, holds promise for **mapping animal sounds and interactions**, yet challenges remain in ensuring **accurate interpretations without imposing human biases**.
* 🐘 In Kenya, researchers utilize recorded elephant sounds to create a beehive fence, demonstrating a **practical application of understanding animal communication** to **mitigate human-wildlife conflict**.
* 🤔 Ultimately, while advancements in AI may enhance our understanding of animal languages, the challenge lies in fostering **genuine listening and engagement** with the natural world.

there aren't many cities in the world with wilderness on their doorstep, but this is the African savannah. So, five rhinos, big train bridge in the distance, and just in that direction there, you got the city heights of Nairobi. As the human population has grown, wild animals have been forced to share their spaces. But while the physical distance might have married, there remains a gap between their world and ours. It's a hippo, or at least we think there is. Oh, there's another one there. We haven't exactly been able to ask what they think. Unbelievable. And then the birds here talking to each other today. Artificial intelligence is helping scientists to explore the croaks, the chirps, and the hounds that pass between and across different species, revealing communications of staggering complexity. I'm Professor Hannah Fry, mathematician and writer. I want to know whether we can decode the language of other species and perhaps even speak to them with the power of AI. Oh, I can see a waggy tail. Any story about animal communication should surely

start with our closest furry friends. How you doing? Look, we're matching. They might make the best companions, but our conversations with them have always been a bit one-sided. To show her the house, this is the thing that most people are interested in. This is his board. This is Cash. Cash has quite the social media following as he is able to communicate via buttons. Grandma friend want. How many do you think that he knows? There's maybe 130, but basically everything over here. If I press any of these, we're going to see quite a large response. The w k button is on this side. Okay, sure. And if there was hasn't learned how to spell yet. No, he has not. This visitor, the board is designed with social words like hello and goodbye at one end and verbs, nouns, and places at the other. And according to Christina, she and Cash can use it to converse. Hey Bubba, can I ask you a question? Do you want a bone? [Music] Yes, yes. Okay, you want a BN. Oh, you clever doggy. There you go, sweet. But every dog

understands the word bone, right? What would be more impressive is if Cash communicated not just what he wants but how he feels. Okay, so I asked him, You want to be brushed right now? 'Cause he was just hovering over this brush. He said, No, I'm sad. That didn't make sense to me, so I asked, Why are you sad? And he said, I'm sick. Sick? You're sick? And he didn't seem sick. Uh, but we went over to the couch, we cuddled, and you're going to see him barf right next to me. Oh wow. Oh yeah, sorry, there is fine. [Music] Okay, maybe we're doing a human interpretation of this, but that is like understanding your own internal emotional state. Do you think that actually the dogs have a much more intelligent inner life than we give them credit for? He absolutely seems to care about things. I never had any idea about the frequency with which my parents visit, very meaningful to him. If they've gone a couple days and they have not visited him, I start to a grandparent.

requests. While many of us want to believe that we can have a meaningful conversation with our parents, some researchers have doubts about what the use of button boards really shows. It is not an exact science by any means, and I and we actually get a lot of pushback on that because people want it to be very clear and very linear. What I will say without a doubt is that what's happening here is communication, and that to me is very, very valuable. So far, little research has been published, but there is some evidence that dogs can combine buttons together to create new meanings. Cash, Cash, oh yeah, you gorgeous boy. And regardless of the science, Christina's motivation is to build a better relationship with her dog. I think Cash and his relationship with Christina are super cute, but I also think that the jury is out on this about whether this is just sophisticated begging or a real form of communication. What's interesting is the language because this is Cash learning English. I think if you're going to claim to have really cracked animal communication, I

think we also have to learn how to speak dog, and that is where artificial intelligence comes in. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was the key that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs and the language of an ancient civilization. Unfortunately, when it comes to communicating with animals, it's unlikely that we're going to find another one. But there is some hope that lies in an incredibly powerful piece of AI architecture known as a Transformer. Now, Transformers are now ubiquitous; they are the engine that drives chatbots like GPT-4, and they work by taking reams of data, text for instance, and mapping it into a multi-dimensional space, a bit like a galaxy of stars. In this galaxy, each star represents a word, but crucially, the distance and direction between the stars encodes relational meaning. For example, the geometric space between Queen and woman will be the same as Princess and girl. This ability to track relationships between words gives Transformers their superpower. It's what helps them to make sense of things like context and structure, and incredibly, if

you map different languages from around the world, even ones as different as English versus U. They all form very similar geometric shapes, meaning if you transpose one map over the other, you can seamlessly translate from one language to another, just like a Rosetta Stone. With the discovery of this hidden mathematical structure, scientists can begin to venture into an alien world to decode animal communication and perhaps even to speak back. [Music] From birds to bats, frogs to Humpback whales, the complexity of animal sounds is astonishing. Research shows Prairie dogs can describe what their predators look like. Budgies use sounds akin to consonants and vowels. And with decades of data collected by scientists just waiting for AI to decode it, these kinds of discoveries could be just the beginning. [Music] I mean, this is an extraordinary building. Yeah, thank you. This is AAR Raskin, a brain. This is a real human brain. A real, real one. Yeah, a real, real one. He co-founded the Earth Species Project, a nonprofit that tries to decode

Communication in nonhuman species. We work with like 40 plus institutions and like 800 biologists. Um, and they record, as you see here, like video, they record audio, they record motion, how the animals move. And so what that lets us start to do is to translate to and from all the different modalities. What does one whale say that causes another whale to dive in terms of the first step of that? Then, like, trying to uncover existing patterns in the data that you're collecting. Like, do you see that there's a particular noise that whales make when another whale dives? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, this, uh, these are a couple Beluga communicating while hunting. Go on. Sounds like radio static, right? Or an alien modem. Yes, an alien modem. I like that a lot. Yeah, I mean, that I could listen to that for 100 years and never make sense of it. Correct? Yeah, and mind scientists haven't been able to make sense of it, but we're at the cusp of having the tools to learn how to, like.

disambiguate to like solve. What's called the cocktail party problem. The cocktail party problem is the task of picking out a single voice from the background of bus. Please could you tell me where the nearest Tube Station is. I'm just not sure of the directions. AI has nearly solved it for human voices, but the progress for animals has been a little slower. Even before you've started trying to understand what an individual animal is talking about in an individual situation, even collecting the data of a single animal speaking is really hard. Yeah, and so you have to teach an AI what does an individual animal sound like, what is the syntax, and once it learns that, then it tries to do lots of separations and it's like, Oh, is this a good separation? So, be able to translate all of that data into meaning is what enables us to start doing this kind of work. It's a little bit like Chat GPT, but instead of for humans, for animals. So, this first bit is the prompt, so this is what the bird sang, and then

the AI continues. It's sort of like autocomplete, right, for animal communication, predictive text, exactly right, but for birds. So here we go. Okay, I didn't, to my ear, I wasn't looking, I didn't notice the point at which it became fake, and yet does the bird notice? You don't know yet. Like, we are right at that cusp of trying for the very first time to have AI animal direct communication. The capability to converse with animals would be an almost magical superpower, but even if we could, what words from our human world would we even say? I think we should expect some parts of our experience to be very similar. You know, we all have mothers, we all need to eat, and we should expect a whole bunch to not be so. If you're using this full AI, right, and it's like doing autocomplete, and you have no idea what it's saying, is there concern that you might, I don't know, like distress the animal or sort of put them in a situation they don't need to be in? Yeah.

one of the really scary things about working on this technology is if we're not careful and we just create a synthetic whale and put it on the ocean that starts to sing like we might mess up a 34 million-year-old wisdom tradition. Humpback whales have the ability to adopt other populations' songs and can broadcast them thousands of miles across the ocean. An AI whale could interfere with that communication, perhaps affecting behavior or navigation. [Music] Yeah, eventually I think we're going to need a kind of Geneva Convention for cross-species communication. Like, this technology is coming whether we build it or somebody else. In some sense, it's inevitable. There is an assumption here that the technology that works for humans could be transported to work for animals too. But just because AI can switch from Euro to Spanish, translating from English to whale seems like a different kind of problem altogether. It feels like there's something missing here, right? You know, when ChatGPT was trained with humans using it and assessing how much sense it made, how

good. It was at replicating human language like we were kind of missing the key translator who can go from one language to the other. I know that that's the point. I know that they're saying that AI can be the Rosetta Stone, but I'm just I'm not sure that I'm convinced that our worldview and the things that we care enough about to have language for are going to map onto the things that are important to animals. [Music] Enough. These are elephant seals. For 3 months a year, they lie around on beaches while the females wait for their newborn pups to be old enough to swim. So what does a colony of elephant seals have to talk about in all of that time? Oh my gosh, the light, the morning. So Beau, when it comes down over all of these hills, it's absolutely beautiful. Biologist Caroline Casey has spent over a decade studying these creatures, got a little bit of mountain goat, we go jeans, and has begun to discover what they have to say. Really.

it's just about sitting here and waiting, you know. I'll just like post up and kind of watch to see what's happening on the colony right now. It's mating season, and the seals' approach to romance is seemingly well one-sided, mostly adult females, and then each female for the most part has a little pup with them. And so typically there's one alpha, and his job is to meet with as many females as possible before they depart back to sea. And that's when things get really dynamic because there's males waiting in the wing for... Is that male over there? Yeah. Rather than heading straight into an energy-draining and sometimes deadly battle, the competing males call out each with a unique rhythm and timbre. This is a real simple call. Oh, it's like sounds like someone with a drum. Yeah. And then I love this one. This one is more complex, so there's like a little substructural component that hopefully you can hear. Oh, this say on The Bongo. Yeah. Through a series of playback experiments, Caroline discovered they

were essentially just saying their own names. They've got names exactly what that they give each other or that they give themselves. They give themselves essentially. We don't know how. We don't know if they learn them or if they're born with them. What so they come in and they're like Jim here. That's the only thing they say. But you need to be able to have experience with Jim to know how to respond to them. But if Bob had beat you up a couple times and you hear the word Bob, all of a sudden you have this association with this negative thing that happened in the world of male elephant seals who only ever say their own name. It's not looking great for an AI Rosetta Stone to communicate with them. But that doesn't mean that AI can't bring other benefits. I would love to work with somebody who specializes in AI to see what they would find. But I'm really driven by a specific scientific question. You know, I'm taking maybe a two-minute recording of this male. I know exactly who he is. I know the

context of the call that he's producing, so it's not just a case of like, get the data now, we've got AI, press the big AI button, and there you go, talk to animal. I mean, you, you, the main, I'm sorry, I'm just so sidetracked by how gigantically enormous that, and now he's was coming up, and he's like, you better come into my her. Oh, is it possible though that maybe there are things other than food and space and mating that these seals are talking about? Sure, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah. I mean, I would be surprised just 'cause we've been studying them for so long, but of course, maybe they love surfing, yeah, of course. We're looking at it through our own human lens, and of course, there may be some subtle patterns that we're missing, so I think that that's where AI can really complement, but it's no substitute for sitting on a JY. I don't think so. I think that the most elegant and profound discoveries of animal behavior have come

from knowing individual animals and watching them and tracking them and just being present. I think the big thing about this project is that it's all about listening rather than communication necessarily. It's all about what these creatures are saying to each other, and they're only intervening to be sure that they've understood it. And it does make me wonder about this idea of communication. I mean, here it's one way, but is there ever going to be a situation where talking to wild animals is a good thing? The potential risks from human-to-animal communication are far-reaching, whether it's causing animals distress or unknowingly impacting entire ecosystems. The stakes are high if the goal of two-way communication is to actually improve our relationship with the natural world. In Kenya, a group of researchers are trying to do just this. This is our headquarters in Nairobi, in this incredible building. Actually, it's very, very old, about 70 years old. They have harnessed the power of communication to address the growing problem of human

elephant conflict in the hope that they can prevent both sides from harm. It all began after hearing indigenous folklore that elephants are terrified of bees. So here we are. So this is one of the inspired Dr. Lucy King hid a loudspeaker near to a herd of resting elephants and played the sound of a disturbed hive of African bees. The bee sound is coming from the side. Can you see her face? She's lifting her head up, her trunk's curling around, ears are out, and then you start to see one female starts to retreat with her head up, tail out. She's clearly alert and she follows and then suddenly because she starts running, they all start running away. Oh my goodness, and you can see them literally galloping away from what they think as bees coming to get them. But not only did they run away, but the elephants listening to bees' head shook as if there were bees in the air, and then they would also dust themselves as if they were thinking there are bees.

I need to knock them out of the air because before this moment, all you knew was that they didn't like chilling out under trees that had beehives in it. But this is like, yeah, the moment when it's like, no, they really do not want to be near the Beast. To better understand what was going on, Lucy used microphones to record low-frequency elephant rumbles, inaudible to humans. Potentially, there's like a ripple of panic that goes through them. Potentially, there's some communication going on there as well. And what she found was rather incredible. You get back to the lab, there on the screen are just ripples of rumbles coming through that have been captured. There's a very specific shape to the B Rumble, and if you played that shape of sound through a very large speaker back to unknowing elephants, they would run away, head shake and dust, no, yeah. So, you basically get the elephant word b, yeah, play it to an elephant, and they react as though they're bees, yes. And that was the

absolute Eureka [Music] moment. Decoding this hidden communication inspired a way to keep elephants and humans away from conflict. Enter the Beehive fence. Hives or identical dummy hives are hung along a wire to create a border around farmers' crops. If an elephant disturbs the wire, the fence releases a swarm of angry bees, sending the elephants on their way. It's a deceptively simple solution and just the beginning of scientific research that could provide conservation at a wider level. Our interpretation of this: we are passionately interested in the animal itself, but then the reality is to help us save them because they're all under such threat. And I guess understanding that comes through language. Perhaps, perhaps you know, perhaps the language might give us an insight into how they are reacting to each other. We played B sounds to certain elephants, and then we played the sound of Samburu warriors to another group of elephants. They don't hide, they don't dust, they actually run. So they rumble, but they don't make a huge load of noise because they want to

be quiet. So, like a word for scary human, yes. And the question is, is it scary human or is it scary samuru? So, the threat level is different, and the elephants respond differently to the threat levels. Yeah, this is the level of complexity that we're teasing apart now with the science that we can do. As AI develops, it will provide researchers with new ways to tune into the animal kingdom. Goals that once seemed fantastical could be closer than ever. And while a meaningful conversation with an elephant might never come to pass, none of it will matter unless we are willing to properly engage and appreciate the other species on this planet. Honestly, I'm a little bit skeptical about how far it's going to take us, because if we do manage to get to this future where we can fully communicate with animals, I'm not sure that humans are going to be that good at listening. [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Could AI Unlock the Secrets of Animal Communication?

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The African savannah is unique for its proximity to urban areas, leading to a shared space between humans and wildlife.

Artificial intelligence is being used to analyze animal communications, revealing their complex interactions.

The story of Cash, a dog using a button board to communicate, raises questions about the true nature of animal communication and their emotional intelligence.

Artificial intelligence, particularly through Transformer architecture, is showing promise in decoding animal communication.

The geometric mapping of words in a multi-dimensional space allows Transformers to track relationships and meanings, similar to the Rosetta Stone's role in translating languages.

With decades of collected data on animal sounds and behaviors, AI has the potential to uncover patterns and meanings, paving the way for a better understanding of nonhuman communication.

AI's Quest to Understand Animal Communication

The cocktail party problem involves isolating a single voice from background noise, a challenge AI has nearly solved for humans but struggles with for animals.

Teaching AI to recognize individual animal sounds and their syntax is difficult, but crucial for understanding their communication.

The potential to converse with animals raises ethical concerns, as an AI's interference could disrupt their natural communication and behavior.

Elephant seals spend three months on the beach, with females waiting for their pups to grow.

Biologist Caroline Casey has studied their communication, discovering that the competing males call out with unique rhythms and timbres, essentially saying their own names.

This unique form of communication raises questions about how they learn or inherit their names, making it challenging for AI to serve as a "Rosetta Stone" for understanding them.

Listening to Wild Animals: The Power of Communication

The project focuses on listening to wild animals and understanding their interactions, rather than forcing communication.

AI can complement the study of animal behavior, but it's no substitute for observing individual animals.

In Kenya, researchers are using the sound of disturbed bee hives to deter elephants and prevent human-elephant conflicts, with surprising success.

Understanding Elephant Communication and Conflict Resolution

Lucy recorded low-frequency elephant rumbles to understand their communication and found that playing the "B Rumble" shape of sound to unaware elephants made them react as if they were near bees.

This discovery led to the creation of the Beehive fence, using real and dummy hives to deter elephants from disturbing farmers' crops.

The research aims to deepen our understanding of animal communication and provide effective conservation strategies, while also raising questions about humanity's ability to listen and engage with other species.