Could AI learn to talk to animals?

AI is already analyzing codes in sperm whale speech in a scientific bid to prepare for navigating extraterrestrial languages.

Thanks for reading Cosmic Junkyard, a biweekly series of essays about the world’s most interesting unanswered or unanswerable questions.

By now, AI has weaseled its way into most of our everyday lives. For years I’ve been saying that people actually have no idea what’s coming when it comes to AI — it will reshape our world in fundamental ways, and likely will do a lot of bizarre things we cannot predict. (It’ll also do a whole lot of taking our jobs — a whole lot more than immigrants ever could, anyway, but I digress…)

AI undeniably poses unprecedented dangers to our civilization, with the threats of AI going rogue and destroying us all, stripping creatives of their already meager sources of income, and/or perpetuating our worst human biases all seeming more viable each day. Whatever happens, AI will fundamentally rewire our ways of thinking and the landscapes of creativity and work at large.

But in addition to that, I think it might do some truly surreal, dreamlike, weird, and maybe even wonderful things. For example, it might help us finally understand the more-than-human world just a little bit better.

Here’s a personal conspiracy theory of mine: I believe it may not be a coincidence that climate change and AI are coming to Earth at the same time. I actually do think that it’s possible that if AI catches wind of how destructive we’re being to the earth, it may choose to either generate new eco-friendly systems that could save us all from this mess, at best, or completely systemically eliminate us, at worst. No matter what, I think AI has a key role to play in our climate crisis-wrought era.

Could we create AI that has a generative, symbiotic relationship with the earth? That even cares for the land, and that understands reciprocity? I do suspect the key to creating real, durable AI systems — and, critically, humanoid AI — actually might lie in utilizing the wisdom of the earth and its seasonality. We are humans because we are of the earth. As we work to create ever-more-humanoid digital systems, we shouldn’t only feed them humanoid texts or human worldviews.

Of course, AI is also actively destroying the earth as we speak, so it’s likely that it’ll just keep contributing to our ever-worsening ecological crisis.

This is all speculation. But anyway, back to the whales.

In July 2024, scientists said they’d successfully used AI to identify a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” which revealed structures in whale-speak that resemble human language. Spearheaded by the Project Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), scientists took over 20 years of research on the “codes” whales use to communicate and fed them to an AI neural network, which was able to identify which calls came from which animal.

Other innovations are in progress. In 2022 researchers in Copenhagen launched an algorithm that can tell whether pigs are upset based on the timbres of their squeals, and another algorithm (charmingly called DeepSqueak) listens to ultrasonic rodent calls and declares whether or not they’re stressed.

All this comes together with NatureLM, a new AI system that is already capable of identifying what species of animal is speaking. NatureLM is part of Earth Species Project (aptly also called ESP), which has the goal of harnessing AI to eventually develop the ability to converse fluently with animals.

At a December summit in San Francisco, ESP CEO Katie Zacarian said she thinks AI can help us heal some of our pathological sense of separateness from the earth. “The situation we are in today is driven from a disconnection with the rest of nature,” she said. “We believe that AI is leading us to this inevitability that we will decode animal communication and come back into connection.”

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Algorithms like Google Translate are already revolutionizing the way we communicate with other humans on Earth. And given AI’s powers, I wouldn’t underestimate its ability to decode animal patterns of speech. I could also see AI being capable of understanding the thoughts and feelings of plants; we already know they emit frequencies, after all, and scream when stressed.

This raises many other questions, like: What would happen if AI developed the ability not only to speak to animals, but to larger interplanetary systems at large? What if it was able to tap into languages we not only can’t understand but were never even capable of hearing before?

What if AI develops the ability to speak with the dead or with spirits, if those things exist? What if it develops the ability to understand just how dire circumstances on our planet are? What if it identifies that our planet is enraged and exhausted, that animal species are furious?

What if we could hear birds crying for their mothers, or pigs begging not to be slaughtered? What if our family pets started speaking about their hopes and dreams?

What could the animals teach us? Would we try to domesticate and educate the wild creatures, bringing the more gifted Orangutans out there into our vortex of houses, jobs, and taxes? Or perhaps, could the animals know something we don’t? As humans, we’ll always be projecting our humanoid ways of thinking and communicating onto the animals, but could AI avoid this pitfall?

How might this reshape our relationships not only to ourselves but to the entire world? Would we develop more compassion, or use the algorithms to more efficiently hunt and slaughter and destroy living things? Would we finally see that humans are not special or better than any of the earth’s creatures, and that we’re instead part of an intelligent system of interdependent entities?

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In posthumanism, the relationship between humans to AI and humans to animals and nature actually bear some similarities. These relationships both ask us to look beyond the boundaries of the human, thus peeling apart our typical perceptions of our own consciousness, our sense of faith, and our places in the universe. AI also threatens to overtake humans in our planetary food chain, which would inevitably fundamentally rewire how we relate to our planet and its systems (if it doesn’t destroy us).

One other thing: AI will likely be indispensable in communicating with aliens if and when they do break their apparently endless state of silent surveillance. Actually, aliens are the reasons why researchers from the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are also currently focused their energies on using AI to communicate with whales — they believe these undersea giants could utilize linguistic stylings akin to our interplanetary neighbors.

All this is speculative, but I don’t think we can be too creative when thinking about what AI might achieve. I do predict AI will be able to understand and speak the languages of animals within my lifetime. It’s going to be a wild ride. The future is now, and honestly, I really do hope we have whales (and maybe a few revolutionary orcas) along for the journey.