Researchers are using AI to try to communicate with whales.
“I don’t know much about whales. I have never seen a whale in my life,” Michael Bronstein says. The Israeli computer scientist, who teaches at Imperial College London, in England, might not seem the ideal candidate for a project involving the communication of sperm whales. But his skills as an expert in machine learning could be key to an ambitious endeavor that officially started in March 2020: An interdisciplinary group of scientists wants to use artificial intelligence to decode the language of these marine mammals. If Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) succeeds, it would be the first time that we actually understand what animals are chatting about—and maybe we could even have a conversation with them.
The project was born in 2017 when an international group of scientists spent a year together at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Radcliffe Fellowship, a program that promises “an opportunity to step away from usual routines.” One day, Shafi Goldwasser, an Israeli-American computer scientist and cryptography expert, came by the office of David Gruber, a marine biologist at City University of New York. Goldwasser, who had just been named the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley, had heard a series of clicking sounds that reminded her of the noise a faulty electronic circuit makes—or of Morse code. That’s how sperm whales talk with one another, Gruber told her. “I said, ‘Maybe we should do a project where we are translating the whale sounds into something that we as humans can understand,’” Goldwasser recounts. “I really said it as an afterthought. I never thought he was going to take me seriously.”
But the fellowship was an opportunity to take far-out ideas seriously. At a dinner party, they presented the idea to Bronstein, who was following recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP), a branch of AI that deals with the automated analysis of written and spoken speech—so far, just human language. Bronstein was convinced that the “codas,” as the brief sperm-whale utterances are called, have a structure that lends them to this kind of analysis. Fortunately, Gruber knew a biologist named Shane Gero who had been recording a lot of sperm-whale codas in the waters around the Caribbean island of Dominica since 2005. Bronstein applied some machine-learning algorithms to the data. “They seemed to be working very well, at least with some relatively simple tasks,” he says. But this was no more than a proof of concept. For a deeper analysis, the algorithms needed more context and more data—millions of whale codas.
But do animals have language at all? The question has been controversial among scientists for a long time. For many, language is one of the last bastions of human exclusivity. Animals communicate, but they do not speak, said the Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz, one of the pioneers of the science of animal behavior, who wrote about his own communications with animals in his 1949 book, King Solomon’s Ring. “Animals do not possess a language in the true sense of the word,” Lorenz wrote.
“I rather think that we haven’t looked closely enough yet,” counters Karsten Brensing, a German marine biologist who has written multiple books on animal communication. Brensing is convinced that the utterances of many animals can certainly be called language. This isn’t simply about the barking of dogs; several conditions have to be met. “First of all, language has semantics,” Brensing says. “That means that certain vocalizations have a fixed meaning that does not change.” Siberian jays, a type of bird, for example, are known to have a vocabulary of about 25 calls, some of which have a fixed meaning.
The second condition is grammar: rules for how to build sentences. For a long time, scientists were convinced that animal communication lacked any sentence structure. But in 2016, researchers published a study in Nature Communications on the vocalizations of great tits. In certain situations, the birds combine two different calls to warn one another when a predator approaches. They also reacted when the researchers played this sequence to them. However, when the call order was reversed, the birds reacted far less. “That’s grammar,” Brensing says.
The third criterion: You wouldn’t call the vocalizations of an animal species a language if they are completely innate. Lorenz believed that animals were born with a repertoire of expressions and…
