Using AI to talk to animals
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Earth Species Project CEO Katie Zacarian at the Axios AI+ Summit in San Francisco. Photo: Chris Constantine for Axios
Researchers are building an AI system that they hope will, one day, allow humans to understand the many languages that animals use to communicate with one another.
Why it matters: Understanding what animals are saying could not only aid human knowledge of our world, but advocates say it might also provide a compelling case for giving animals broader legal rights.
Driving the news: NatureLM is an AI language model that can already identify the species of animal speaking, as well as other information including the approximate age of the animal and whether it is indicating distress or play.
- Created by Earth Species Project, NatureLM has even shown potential in identifying the dialogue of species the system has never encountered before.
- NatureLM is trained on a mix of human language, environmental sounds and other data.
- The nonprofit recently secured $17 million in grants to continue its work.
What they're saying: "We are facing a biodiversity crisis," Earth Species Project CEO Katie Zacarian said during a demo of NatureLM at the recent Axios AI+ Summit in San Francisco.
- "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."
Between the lines: Translation, in the broadest sense, is something that generative AI has proven to be quite good at. Sometimes that's translating from one human language to another, but the technology is also adept at transforming text from one genre to another.
Yes, but: An added wrinkle with translating animal languages is that instead of moving between two known languages, we have a limited understanding of how animals communicate and what they are capable of conveying through speech.
- Researchers know, for example, that birds make different sounds when they are singing songs as compared to sounding a warning call.
- They also have determined that many species have individual names for one another and some, like prairie dogs, have a system of nouns and adjectives to describe predators.
The big picture: Earth Species Project is one of many endeavors looking to tap AI to address planetary concerns.
- Microsoft last week detailed SPARROW, an AI system designed to measure biodiversity in some of the earth's most remote reaches.
- Developed by Microsoft's AI for Good lab, the effort uses solar-powered systems to collect data from cameras, acoustic monitors and other sensors.
- With human progress on combatting climate change seen likely to fall short of needed targets, many are looking to AI to provide alternative approaches.
While AI shows promise in helping better understand nature, its massive energy demand is straining electrical systems and pushing tech companies to defer or alter plans to operate in a carbon neutral manner.
- "It is something the entire field needs to wrestle with, among the many other ethical challenges around responsible use and safety," Zacarian said.
Go deeper: Watch Zacarian's presentation at the Axios AI+ Summit.
