Hello everyone and welcome back to our Channel. Today we have an incredibly exciting and groundbreaking topic to discuss: translating whale language with artificial intelligence. Wales, the majestic giants of the ocean, have always fascinated us with their mysterious and complex communication. And now, thanks to the power of AI, scientists are making remarkable strides in unraveling their intricate language. So let’s dive right in and explore the fascinating world of communicating with whales.
This is the sound of the biggest toothed predator on the planet, a song being broadcast from the deepest reaches of the sea. A call that sounds less like a harmonious melody like we hear from other whales, but more like a digital data transfer. It’s the sound that haunted sailors for centuries, a sound which they thought to be the cries of the ghosts of drowned sailors calling out to them.
Amazingly, it wasn’t until 1957 that scientists even realized that these sounds were, in fact, coming from whales. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that they realized that these undulating clicking bellowing noises were a form of communication. And now, researchers think sperm whales could be our best chance at breaking a barrier we’ve never broken. That they might hold the key to unlocking the first-ever case of inter-species communication. Because if you were to bet on one animal that had something that was even close to human language, it would be the sperm whale.
Over the years, scientists have learned that their brains are extremely developed, that they have a rich social and family lives, culture, and an intricate communication system to support it all. Their lives, in many ways, are similar to ours, and their language could have developed for similar reasons. Plus, they’ve had their massive brains for tens of millions of years longer than we’ve had our current-sized brains. And with a vast repertoire of different sounds with intricate patterns, it seems as though sperm whale language could be as complex as our own.
Speaking with other animals has long been a part of the collective human imagination, part of folklore, fables, and fantasy in many different cultures. But now, for the first time, we have technology that might be able to actually break the code. Recently, we’ve all seen the huge strides in the field of natural language processing with chatGPT-3 giving a clear idea of what is possible when it comes to computers and human language.
As technology like this has advanced dramatically over the last 10 years, scientists now think they can apply these techniques to the field of inter-species communication, specifically to sperm whales. Because sperm whales and other species aren’t just singing to one another, they seem to be communicating specific messages, maybe even using language in a way that we could understand.
For thousands of years, humans have considered language to be one of the defining characteristics of our species and something that other animals couldn’t possibly approximate. So we hardly bothered to investigate all the ways that animals actually are communicating. Today, with better technology, we’re starting to realize that many species have complex forms of conveying information.
Prairie dogs have distinctive alarm calls for different predators and have even used different calls to distinguish the size, shape, color, and speed of those predators. Male and female putty-nosed monkeys each produce their own alarm calls when leopards approach, the females calling to get males to go on the defense and the males calling to signal they’re ready for a fight. Bat squeaks aren’t just echolocation to help them hunt, they sometimes contain information about the speaker and which another bat is being addressed. Even tiny jumping spiders have a form of communication through vibrations.
The animal kingdom is clearly full of species communicating to one another. But whether or not they’re using language is much harder to recognize. When linguistics developed as an area of study, specifically interested in analyzing the differences between human language and the mechanics of how language works and is acquired, it seemed clear that nothing else on Earth was communicating the way we are.
Human language has grammar, the overarching structure of each language, and syntax, which is the order in which words are spoken in order to convey meaning. We have the ability to create new words and use them to communicate information about things that happened elsewhere or in the past or future. Human languages are complex and nuanced. What we don’t know is if the same is true of any other animal. But there’s one species that might be able to help us solve that problem.
As we’ve learned more and more about sperm whales, they seem to be the perfect candidate to put our non-human translation abilities to the test. Sperm whales make the loudest noises of any living creature, up to 230 decibels. For reference, when sounds are made above the water, human eardrums rupture when noises are louder than 150 decibels.
Sperm whale communities also use discrete sequences of clicks that get repeated in specific patterns called codas. Researchers believe this is the basic communication unit for their language, and codas differ between whales in different regions. For the whales off the coast of Dominica, a typical coda has five clicks and lasts for around 4 seconds. They have recognizable patterns measured by inter-click intervals. Codas are mostly produced during periods of socialization, not when the whales are hunting or engaged in other activities. And calves can take up to two years to produce recognizable codas, and before that, they babble just like human babies.
All of these elements seem like the ingredients to a language that we might be able to make sense of. Thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence, researchers at SETI are working on a project known as the Cetacean Translation Initiative. This project aims to collect data from a group of sperm whales around the Caribbean island of Dominica. By collecting massive amounts of background whale bioacoustics data, scientists hope to uncover patterns in their language.
The AI will be trained not just to predict what a single whale might say next, but will also learn to predict what a second whale might say, like in a conversation. The result will be like a whale chatbot. However, gathering enough data for this project is a challenge. Sperm whales vocalize almost constantly, but only 25% of their clicks are used for communication. Dividing the number of seconds in a year by four times the number of whales gives us approximately 400 million to 4 billion clicks a year. While not nearly close to chatGPT-3 levels of data, it’s still enough to work with.
To collect this data, scientists are using various methods, including tethered buoy arrays, recording devices attached to the whales themselves, and autonomous sound recording robots. All of this data will be combined into a complex array of data, which can then be parsed out by different algorithms.
In conclusion, the prospect of translating whale language with AI is an exciting step forward in our understanding of these enigmatic beings. As technology continues to evolve, we find ourselves at the forefront of a new era of marine exploration. Who knows what other secrets the oceans hold, waiting to be unlocked by the power of AI? Thank you for joining us on this captivating journey into the world of whale communication and AI. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content, and be sure to hit that notification bell so you never miss an update. Until next time, stay curious and keep exploring.
