Squawk bots: Can generative AI lead us to understanding animals?

Just as the discovery by Western society of whale song in the 1970s led to a moratorium on deep-sea whaling and contributed to the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency, the team at the Earth Species Project hopes that the more we truly know about the creatures around us, the more we will know about ourselves — and the more we can do to protect the planet we share.

“I think about how humans have been speaking and communicating vocally, passing down culture, for 100,000 to 300,000 years,” Raskin said. “Whales and dolphins have communicated vocally, passing down culture and songs, for 34 million years. That which is oldest correlates with that which is wisest, so just imagine what we can learn by listening.”

To achieve this, Raskin and the team at Earth Species Project are including some of the most popular and consequential innovations of the moment as part of a suite of techniques to realize their project: generative AI and large language models. They believe the insights behind  models, such as Google’s LaMDA and GPT-3, can be foundational in understanding of non-human communication. 

Broadly speaking, the Earth Species Project is trying to solve an unstructured data problem through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It’s just that, unlike most other problems solved with AI, understanding animal communication has no basic ground truth, no foundation from which to start. 

The project is currently in the process of working with scientists and researchers across the world to create benchmarks and foundation models which include data from a range of species, including whales, seals, dolphins, crows, and many other kinds of birds; as well as working with partner animal labs on early communication experiments. 

Imagine a LaMDA or Bard, but for animal communication. Just like you can build a text chatbot in a human language you don’t understand, ESP believes they can build an audio chatbot for animal communication that nobody yet understands.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/EQVsKhX