Animal behaviorists increasingly use artificial intelligence in their research, but experts are grappling with how to wield the technology responsibly. In Shark Bay, Australia, researcher Stephanie King of the University of Bristol co-leads the Shark Bay Dolphin Research project, one of the longest-running wild dolphin studies in the world. She spends hours listening to dolphins' whistles, clicks and other sounds, and she integrates AI into her research process.
“If it's used responsibly, AI can transform what we can do with the data we collect,” she says. But when asked if AI will someday allow humans to “speak dolphin,” she stiffens. “I think we're doing the animals a disservice by focusing on that question,” she says.
Concerns about the AI narrative
King says the problem is not AI itself but the narrative around it. Her field is 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. There are even cash prizes for breakthroughs, including the Coller Dolittle Challenge, which seeks an algorithm for communicating with non-human organisms.
“It's a sexy topic,” King acknowledges, but she believes the allure of tech dollars and media attention is nudging scientists to make premature claims and describe their work in sensational terms. “They tend to be biasing themselves towards the most exciting discovery,” she says, which “misleads us to what we know about these animals.”
What we know and what we don't
What we know, in many cases, is very little. “They've been studied for decades, but we're still scratching the surface with what many of the sounds mean,” King says of dolphins. Sound itself likely means something different to dolphins than to humans. They detect pitches far outside our range, process acoustic information faster, and their sensory systems are wired differently. Both humans and dolphins can echolate, but dolphins process echolocation information in the part of the brain connected to touch, while for humans it's more connected to vision.
“We need to appreciate that they have a complex communication system that we barely understand,” says King. She believes the focus should be on learning about that system rather than trying to hack into it and start a conversation.
Elephant researcher's perspective
Elephant researcher Joyce Poole agrees. “I get quite exasperated by this goal of being able to talk to the animals,” she says. “I think it's kind of gimmicky.” Poole has spent decades observing African savanna elephants and building up annotated field recordings of their vocalizations. She's skeptical about inserting humans into their dialogues. “Just the basic ability to understand what they have to say and what they are thinking about – that's enough for me,” she says. “I don't need to interfere in their lives more than necessary.”
At the same time, Poole believes making elephants' inner lives more legible could transform how we treat them. “I hope that by showing that they're capable of a more sophisticated kind of communication that we gain them some respect from our fellow humans, and save a place for them in the world, together with their ecosystems and their other fellow travelers,” she says.
Potential benefits and risks
César Rodríguez-Garavito, founding director of the More Than Human Life (Moth) program at NYU, sees AI as a promising avenue for understanding non-human animal lives. He thinks AI could help give animals a voice in decisions that shape their lives, such as regulating marine-protected areas. “I think that this is no longer a science fiction question,” he says.
“But I cannot speak about potential benefits without speaking about risks,” Rodríguez-Garavito says. “We have, as human beings, a very mixed track record, to put it gently, in using technologies.” There's the possibility of intentional harm, like using AI to trick or coerce animals, perhaps moving them into areas where they're easier to kill. “The nightmare scenario is one where we interrupt their communications and their lives at will, just for our entertainment,” he says.
To steer the field away from these scenarios, the Moth program recently published the Pepp framework (prepare, engage, prevent and protect), ethical guidelines for using non-human animal communication technologies. Rodríguez-Garavito notes that “at this point, there is no international agreement on AI. It is a free-for-all.”
Questioning the hype
Mickey Pardo, senior scientist at ElephantVoices, sees potential benefits and risks but wonders if the speculation is overblown. “Playbacks can be stressful for animals even without AI – when you're just taking prerecorded sounds and playing them back – especially if you don't know the context of those sounds,” he says. He also questions whether we're focusing too much on possible harms from AI when there are other ways we negatively impact animals' lives. “The way that animals are treated in biomedical science is so incredibly horrific compared to anything that anybody's doing in the field of animal communication,” he says.
Marine mammal researcher Luke Rendell of the University of St Andrews says the AI hype has gotten ahead of the science. “There's been this idea put about that AI is going to find something that we couldn't,” he says. “It's something of a confidence trick, I think.” He's concerned about long-term damage to the field when the Dr Dolittle machine fails to materialize. He recalls the work of John Lilly, whose efforts to teach dolphins English using controversial methods brought fame but ended tragically, and says the study of dolphin communication was “the punchline of a joke in scientific circles” for over a decade. “We've had this flowering in the last 15 to 20 years of understanding and knowledge about cetacean society and communication,” he says, “and my main fear is that it is being undermined by these irresponsible claims.”
King says it comes back to testing any AI findings with the experts: the animals themselves. “I think you have to use these AI and machine learning approaches alongside careful examination of the animals: when they produce calls, and in what context, and how they behave,” she says. She insists her students identify dolphins manually from photographs, despite AI being faster. “If you really want to understand behavior, then the details matter,” she says. “And the details take time. You can't rush it.”
As exciting as it might be to imagine walking around with an animal translator, there's nothing stopping us from listening to animals and caring about their lives, whether or not AI ever allows us to talk with them.
