Learn more about these incredible animals! Why Orcas Are Called Killer Whales → ua-cam.com/video/FIwjehSYKJg/v-deo.html New Species of Orca → ua-cam.com/video/TnJVE2oNJH0/v-deo.html Why Orcas Are Sinking Ships → ua-cam.com/video/C0cGdd9lUgY/v-deo.html Dolphin Attacks Are On the Rise → ua-cam.com/video/FGjCPr1wLbk/v-deo.html
hey i speak a bunch of languages fluently and know ai. this is really really interesting and entirely possible as a breakthrough. basically someone will eventually tokenize known cetacean phonemes. if you ever run into models or open source on this do just reply right here. i'm fluent in russian, chinese, german, french, english, and am really into animal communication in theory and cetaceans may well have sufficient brains for speech to be more than just "let's meet next friday for netflix and chill" or "you gonna eat that" elephants are also candidates.
large language models are not large mathematical models nor are the large video models and they work on tokens (syllables, words, punctuation) not letters. Human-Whale communication will be broken within 3 years as in solved.
@@njay4361 Thank you! I couldn't remember where the line came from and It was starting to really bug me cos it was so familiar! (It's 'Galaxy' btw, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams)
I read the UC Davis paper when it came out. I'm equally parts amused, fascinated and *mortified* that we successfully carried out a conversation with an arguably sapient species... and the content amounted to essentially a *crank call,* with the humpback ending the convo by "giving us the flipper." 💀
Good luck with that. A pod of Orcas in Australia teamed up with the local whalers to hunt humpbacks for nearly a century until the 1950s. The Orcas located the humpbacks, alerted the whalers to their presence if necessary, led them to the whales (sometimes even dragging the boats) and helped with the hunt. The Orcas got to eat tasty humpback lips, tongues, and genitals, and left everything else for the whalers. Win-win. It is believed that this may have been a centuries, if not millennia, old shared tradition between Orcas and humans in the area. Imagine what humpbacks cruising up and down the east coast of Australia had to talk about.
As an AI developer (for a small company, I don't work for any of the leading ones) I believe that there is a good chance of being able to build an AI that can translate animal vocalizations if they actually form a language even if it is extremely different from ours. The path towards that could look like this: - We first need to figure out the words/syllables/alphabet (so we can tokenize the inputs), not the meaning, just the individual sounds. And that seems like what they are doing right now. - Once we have words, we can either train an autoencoder or an autoregressive next word predictor with a bottleneck in the middle. That on its own won't give us a translation (may give us a chatbot that only wales understand) but if successfully trained, we can take the activations of the artificial neurons in that bottleneck and use those as an embedding (turns each word into a many dimensional vector, when we do that for human languages individual numbers of that vector can represent things like meaning, ie "dog" and "cat" will share quite a bit of values with each other and with "animal"). We won't know what does each dimension of that embedding mean. - Once we can tokenize and embed we can train an LLM. If we just do that, we would just end up with a better chatbot that only whales understand and that only knows what whales know. (we could do that and let it talk with whales to try getting a bigger dataset) - But we can try something else: Instead of train a whale LLM from scratch, we add another two dimensions to the whale embedding and make sure that the number of dimensions of the embedding that we have generated matches the ones we generate for humans. Those two extra dimensions would contain an 1.0 in only one of them depending on whether it is whale or human language. Then we take a pre trained LLM for humans with those two dimensions added (or two pre existing ones but unused or barely used, repurposed) and fine tune / continue training with both the whale dataset and the human dataset alternating samples of each in each batch. The last part is real tricky but even if the meaning for each dimension excepting the two that we introduced by hand won't match at all, forcing a transformer to understand both under the same architecture is likely to lead to some unified internal representations at the outputs of the intermediate layers (backpropagation and gradient descent would in some sense try to reuse what is in there from the human pre training, interleaving with human data would prevent progressively deviating from that too much). The transformer architecture used in modern chat bots would be particularly apt with this as it acts as some kind of progressive refining through algebraic operations between the embeddings of the tokens (that can act as logical reasoning) in the attention operators and each layer MLP can look up extra related meanings related to the input or do some non linear operations, the fact that the MLPs don't have outputs larger than the embedding space forces the network to compress the reasoning for the next layers in a single embedding vector. That is likely to indeed force some kind of internal translation for at least some of what was learned. It is unlikely to work perfectly but I'd expect that if you train such chatbot and you just ask "What does this mean in English?" followed by some whale language. It would likely answer something vaguely related to what the whale intended, at least some times. That if it works at least to some extent could be an stepping stone that could be iterated upon. There is likely an optimized topology and training procedure that would maximize the reuse of features learned from human languages. Once we have even rudimentary communication, that could bootstrap the building of more comprehensive datasets. We could just ask the whales to ELI5 when we don't understand lol. They may even be interested in helping us understand, something like we show them something = they tell us the whale word for that. I hope someone does that and that it works, it would be about the closest thing to meeting intelligent aliens and good practice for when that may happen too.
@@GoogleAreEnemyCombatants It is not easy to further simplify it without a background in artificial neural networks. I laid out a way to maybe train something like chatgpt to translate whales to English (or other animals or aliens if they do have a language) without actually knowing ourselves any of that language. I am speculating that it could work but I believe that it would take a lot of effort to make it work well. One good thing is that it likely doesn't take something the size of chatgpt but chances are something with a similar architecture but 1/20 the size or a bit less could work. Still the training of such thing would require some significant resources.
@@eruiluvatar236 with enough training, an AI can figure out what sound a whale will make. How do we go from that to asking what their favorite color is?
@@GoogleAreEnemyCombatants I explained that in the original post. The very simplified explanation is that we can force the artificial neural network to use an internal shared representation for human and whale languages, teach it both and ask it to translate. Without pre existing translation examples it won't do great but though what I explained it will likely be able of doing some very rough translation. But once we have even rough ones, we can iterate and refine the model and dataset. It is based on how we trained them to understand human languages, they learned on their own both their internal representations of words inferring their meaning in the process and the relationships to other words.
@@eruiluvatar236 so, the bot gets its own native language and then is trained on human and whale language and uses bot language as an intermediary to translate. But we have never given a bot it's language. It creates its own while training.
I would argue that music DOES contain "information". I agree with the criticism of describing complex non-human communication systems with an anthropocentric focus. Fascinating video! Thanks for the insights.
It doesn’t matter if this is a success right off the bat, but this is what AI really should be purposed for! Even if the difference engine, language learning model, whatever you wanna call it (it’s not real Ai, yet) gets it wrong 999 times out of 1000 - that one time out of 1000 is likely statistically faster than humans would’ve arrived to that point. Also, it will explore avenues, in ways we don’t, that will yield unexpected(ly beautiful) results! So happy to run across this video!! We all know that our animals, while perhaps not possessing the same level of mental function, also exist in an emotional, and perhaps even spiritual, spectrum. We feel this inside. We don’t have concrete evidence, but this gets us even closer; and I’m ALL FOR IT!!! I WOULD LOVE TO BE ABLE TO SAY “HELLO” TO A WHALE!!! Really, Octopuses/podes/pi are my loves, but I truly love all living beings! ☺️❤️🙏🏼
"Not real AI yet" That's what you'll forever say, no matter how advanced the AI will get. Accept it: we're just complex inference engines ourselves. Btw, I'd love to chat with octopuses and all other animals too.
Most people don't realise that most human languages are nothing like each other, if they haven't been related for only some few thousand years. Parts of speech we're familiar with can't be expected to be the way innumerable human languages work. An animal language can't be expected to resemble a type used by human language groups spoken by billions, nor even the many many thousands working in some completely different way, plus even a larger number that hasn't been anybody's natural language for just a few generations. Most human languages in different groups are not at all like each other, and you can't expect an animal language, even if fairly large or meaningful, to resemble a common human one.
Oh, human languages get even wilder than that. You know the "eSkImOs HaVe 100 WoRdS fOr SnOw" idea? Yeah, no. They have _4 words_ for snow. The thing is, the Inuit languages are polysynthetic, which menas the language doesn't have "words" or "sentences" so much as 50-syllable-pile-ups of what we'd consider "words" in English¹, all glued together into a single whole that _looks like_ a word to an English-speaker¹ but functions like a phrase or even an sentence. So, the Inuit don't have 100 words, they have 4 words that they can glue dozens of adjectives on. Then there's things like word-order and ergativity. Both change how you put together your thoughts. The 2 most common word-orders are Subject-Object-Verb and Subject-Verb-Object, with SOV being slightly more common. And ergativity is about which is considered the "normal" or "default" part of a sentence: the Subject or the Object. Most languages leave the Subject unmarked, meaning the doer of the action gets the attention. And with intransitive verbs, where the doer and the recipient of the action are the same, its one noun is treated as a Subject, as a doer. Example: "I sleep." I am the one doing the sleeping. But in languages that follow the Ergative-Absolutive paradigm, its the _thing being acted on_ that is unmarked and considered the "default". And the noun that operates with intransitive verbs is treated as the direct-object. So the nearest equivalent to my example, under the ergative-absolutive paradigm, would be "sleep me," i.e. the act of being asleep is _happening to me._ That's a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world. Then there's Evidentiality, a _required_ marking on verbs that some languages have that indicates whether or not the speaker is talking about something they saw firsthand, heard from someone who saw it firsthand, heard of it through heresay, or are only guessing about. So, yes, human languages contain a wide range of variations that encode very different ways of thinking about the world. [¹You can replace "English" with any other lanugage in the Indo-European Lanugage family. Or with Chinese. Or Thai. Or most of the languages in Africa. Polysynthetic languages outside of the Americas are _rare._]
@John_Weiss and you also made the case for what they all have in common. This can be used to attempt to identify structure in whale concept formation, regardless of the "lingo" unique to their pod.
Languages are the same across the board. It's just a way to communicate using complex sounds. It's the same for birds, mice or any other animal. I know the alarm sound the magpie makes when my cat is outside. I know when my dog whimpers, it's in pain. I know my cat is content when i pet her because of her purrs. When a baby cries, it's hungry. Animals dont think in words, but in concepts and mental images. When my dog remembers her buried bone outside, she sees a mental picture and reacts on it. Never does she think of the word "Bone". But she can be taught that certain sounds belong to certain objects. When I say Bone, she rushes outside and checks on it. We are all limited to the sounds we are able to make. The more sounds, the bigger the potential for more vocabulary.
I have played my violin for herds of cows on a mountainside, deer in a snow covered field at night, a rooster in a barnyard... They definitely are interested, and respond in surprising ways. I would love to interact with another species by sketching pictures. There are lots faster artists, but as a cartoonist I can work pretty fast. There are other people who don't think of themselves as artists, but are able to render VERY FAST and Recognizable "iconic" sketches of objects. => Some people have that ability to reduce things to simple icons that are still recognizable depictions of a more complex object. Could a Dolphin enjoy sketching underwater, like the Elephant who has learned to paint with brushes and a canvas on an Easel? Seems a way of starting to work with an intelligent species, Have the objects available, the sketcher makes a drawing and the dolphin should be able to see the relationship between the drawing and the object. Build from there, sequences of eating, fighting, catching fish, sorting objects, assembling objects from parts. et cetera. Come to think of it, There are violins made from injection molded plastic that could be played underwater... Or cast aluminum fiddles... hmmmmm.
Thank you for this. The reports of "scientists had a 20 minute conversation with a whale" have bothered me because it's not a conversation if you don't know what you're saying (it's okay to not know what /they/ are saying because that's how both of you learn what the other is saying). So knowing that it was repeated contact calls that were returned, with matching intervals, makes me believe that we were basically saying, "hey. Hey. heeey. hEeeeey." and the whale was responding in kind. It makes me think that some researchers should synthesize their own contact calls and play them each time they approach the pods they are studying. (specifically contact calls for the BOAT) We won't know what the "name" /means/ (if anything) but it would be very interesting to see if the whales start reacting to that particular contact call.
I agree with everything here. Some linguists and biologists have compared the "20 minute" conversation to playing a recording of a wolf howl to another wolf in order to elicit a howl. I do think it was more complex than that, because of the timing and interval matching, but it wasn't a conversation as it has been portrayed. It would be interesting to generate a unique contact call and see how a whale would interact with it... that is an intriguing thought!
Great video! And thanks for all the references to the papers :) Just a comment on the AI things, sure developing a model like GPT3 consumes a lot, and sure, language models are not super precise. BUT, machine learning is a biiig field itself. You can train small models in your computer in minutes processing even a couple of GB of data and there are models for doing things like clustering (for example, to identify different sounds) which can work with a veery high accuracy for many problems. Just taking LLMs as reference is an unfair comparison!
Nope. Not everyone can train a model on their computer. That's a first world thing. Training a simple clustering model with a few thousands of examples takes hours on my computer and the result is, obviously, pretty much useless. If it wasn't for Colab, I would still be hiding away, depressed and mourning for the impossibility of the common man to do ML development. (But I'm still depressed because I still can't pretrain a SOTA LLM from scratch :p)
Thank you KP. You said what I thought. If language between humans and any animal were to happen, my opinion is that the animals would run away screaming. Our species has been awful to every other one on this earth. Especially Cetaceans.
Maybe they don’t know? I mean not even every human does and we have access to the internet, libraries, TV etc. I mean there are people that when asked to name 3 countries outside NA they say europe, Africa and Mexico. And we are supposed to be a intelligent species.
No amount of AI will EVER achieve that because animals do not have a true language system. While AI can help us better analyze animal vocalizations, it's important to remember that these are not structured languages with grammar or syntax. We mostly understand what terrestrial animals are communicating through their calls-basic messages like warning signals, mating calls, or expressions of distress. However, when it comes to marine animals, particularly deep-sea species, we know much less about their vocalizations, largely due to the challenges of studying them in their natural environment. The ocean’s vastness and depth make it difficult to gather and interpret the sounds they produce
@@jorgen7180 Yes I also believe we will never decipher animal languages per se but I'm hopeful ai will be able to find patterns etc. so that we can understand and communicate in broad, general terms at least.
@@jorgen7180 How do we know that they do not have a “true” linguistic system, when we only “mostly understand what terrestrial animals” are saying, and know “much less” about marine mammal communication? I think the only thing we know for sure is that human competence is consistently overestimated, otherwise we wouldn’t be destroying the planet we share with creatures who are not.
When we consider the millions of dollars drawing us toward more consumption without awareness of the planet your critique of A.I. at the end was spot on. The potential to amplify bias transcends anything we've done previously. Truly open to the public understanding of the code creating a particular direction is the best hope we have to lessen its destructiveness but in a capitalistic model that is not remotely possible. There is no way in our current economic/scientific system the payback for this knowledge can avoid being weaponized and capitalized upon. "A tree should exist only if we can consume it's value." If we were to communicate freely as we do with humans I don't think we would treat them any better than we treat the First Nations of the US or African Americans on the whole. ie net worth of AA is 10x less than their dominant counterpart and we blame AA's for it.
Thank you, KP, a fascinating video as ever and, as ever, I have learned a lot. Why, though, do I fear for cetaceans should we be able establish some form of interaction in the future? Interracting with humans, other than experts, seldom ends well for wild animals. Sorry to be wet blanket.
Would be totally amazing though to be able to tell a whale "Careful, shallow water ahead, don’t get closer" and the whale answering "thanks mate, bit confused from all this loud noise, you know what’s up with that?".
Just put down a television in the water. Show the dolphins images of sea creatures, plants, etc. And every picture might produce a different sound from the dolphins. And so you have a broader image of what the dolphins are saying and so you can start translating their language. You just need to confirm some 20 or 50 words first. And maybe that can be done by television, interactions, food.
Thank you for this summary. There are audio recordings of crickets slowed down, and they sound so beautiful. I wonder how the clicks and whistles might sound slowed down, and also in different mediums than water too. Also, that the circling whale repeated not just the sound but also the temporal interval suggests a potential spatial aspect to their communication, doesn't it?
Orcas are my favorite aquatic animals, love the wolves of the sea. Wolves and dogs are my favorite elsewhere. I also work IT and hate the hallucinating AI search engine integration. So thank you for touching on that. But it is much more than just that.
Those are fabrications (made up stuff) rather than true hallucinations (sensory training defects). Many people in the ML community use incorrect words.
The idea that AI and machine learning were all bundled up into essentially chatgpt is misleading. LLMs are considerably innacurate and do not approach reasoning, while models designed for specific domains of tasks reach much closer to 100% error free for the given task. Needless to say, a conversation in an alien language is hard because there is no decodable feedback mechanism.
This is fascinating. There's also a good opportunity to learn about personal biases. Older versions of Chatgpt can't see individual letters. They see tokens that consist of multiple letters. That's why it couldn't count correctly the number of r's in strawberry. If you try to shoehorn human expectations and models to animal languages you might do as wildly incorrect conclusions as trying to figure out why Chatgpt couldn't answer such a trivial question.
The biggest mistake is not assuming that these Goliath’s are more intelligent than us. Obviously language that uses complex vibratory patterns is processing at a much higher speed, which is why saying ‘alphabet’ sounds silly. It really does seem more like music in the way that notes and frequency affect our moods but you can consider musical notes as a musical ‘alphabet’. But saying that it can’t process intelligent concepts just reflects the stupidly of that statement. Certain frequencies tied to notes can produce images. My bet is that whales are communicating through mental pictures produced by sounds. Your reservation on Ai is perhaps misinterpreted. Researchers arent using ChatGPT or google search summary’s to process this information… they’re using highly specialized sensitive algorithms and data made specifically for these projects. Environmentally though with training data, you must give to take. Within a few years free energy will be available to us because humanity has pushed so far in this field. Yes it’s sad that we had to burn a bunch of carbons to make that happen, but in the long run, it will be worth it.
Nice description of cetacean sounds (vocalizations?). I tend to disagree with the notion that music is not the same as communication. It is true that music is different from a verbal communication - but verbal communications include more than mere words. In addition to the words in a verbal exchange, there are several other aspects that are also communicated. Just think about speech for a minute. If we hear someone speak, we can usually figure out if they are male or female, child or adult, stressed or relaxed, tired or active, and other parameters. If we are familiar with the person that is speaking, we can even figure out other parameters, such as deceit or truth, comfort level, paying attention (or not), interest or disinterest, ... All of this counts as communication, above and beyond the mere words. Music does this too, without the complications from the words. I suppose it might be possible that cetaceans are singing music, instead of using words, ... maybe. It remains to be seen (or heard).
All very good points! I had originally planned on a longer segment about how whale songs may be more similar to music, but I ended up cutting it for pacing. But I think you explained it better than I would have. Thanks for posting this!
Chat gpt tried to tell me the word like is and has always been spelled "lik" and while arguing about this it uses the word a dozen times and each time spelled it correctly 😂
I'm so pleased to hear this research exists. That would be exactly my approach. I would like to add this, but please forgive the poor terminology: sounds are sensory experience. Not just sounds, but any energy. At least for me. This energy resonates in your body, and it is a sensation; even every thought is a sensation. It is different if words are something external, objective and analytical, rather if they are a sensation of your body. So the first thing is to synchronize, and that is exactly where these research goes. The people who can help bridge the gap between this different perceptions are probably empaths or highly sensitive people. It is a translation from visual structure to sensorial (if this is the right expression). Thank you!
2 ravens led me to a freshly trained-killed moose. After I opened it up and cut off its hind quarters, the ravens could feast on the guts. Birds can communicate with people if you bother to learn their lingo.
Well, at least when your chat programs ask the whales, "Can I mamu duck-face to flee banana patch?" the cetaceans can still get another good laugh at human ignorance.
7:39 it's also possible that their sounds change when they see each other, like Italians or Romans vigoursly using their hands to express emotional context 😂
There are so many possibilities, and it often depends on species. Something I left out is that humpback whale songs are relatively stable, but they do change over time... but only west to east. [1] www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/humpback-whale-songs-spread-from-west-to-east-176855840/ There is so much we don't know and it's honestly a fascinating field of study. I wish we knew more!
This reminds me of the music scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Whales and dolphins have language, but because we are aspect-blind to their language because we do not understand their form-of-life. However, AI might actually solve this hemiopia, which would be impressive.
I hope we are able to speak with cetaceans in my lifetime. That's one thing I'm very excited for. For all the hope about other intelligence in the universe, there is alien intelligence right here on Earth. I do think we will be able to communicate eventually. What you need is underwater drones that can observe a pod over a long span like dozens of years and broadcast their observations to scientists. If we can do this in space we can do it in the ocean.
So... have you tried teal animal communicators ? 1 Empathy : Feel other's emotions 2 telepathy :Think other's though. 3. Feel the environment These are important skills to train so we are ready to meet extraterrestrials.
could it be, that the reason why the whale waited the same interval to respond, is that it's a way of establishing the distance between the whales through the speed of sound when they hear the sound but can not see the other whale. (which is not the case near the boat, ofcourse. maybe the whale was confused by the sound, coming from a boat)
Well done, and I appreciate you showing the downside of AI. It seems to me, just from my experience with pets, that they do have language. It is way less complicated, and much of it is non verbal. My cockatiel used the phrase "What cha doin," as a general greeting. I also found he learned more as a young bird, but dropped a lot of his vocal mimicry with age, and when I got him a companion bird.
Instead of learning animals language. Record their sounds then train them with those sounds to the meanings humans can understand. Rewrite their language using their unknown language.
I think the issue with analyzing intelligence in other species is that people tend to measure intelligence by human standards. We're just one example of intelligence, and by limiting every other possibility to our own definition, We're missing out on so much empathy and connection between species.
I expect the biggest hurdle will be the 'communication system' as mentioned in 8:13. For sure we might share, communicate pattern that match some tasks humans AND animals, differenting on this level seems little ridiculous here, operate, and so we might have conversation like 'oh its raining, as yesterday', or 'i love my kids, would kill for them to survive', but long time not like 'the barber in the street not even capable to handle a scissors', or 'the stock market is behaving crazy today'. Some folks in the forests might not often think about screentime on smartphones - even to grandparents sometimes this is complicated. Above all, “demons of industrial society”, which are probably partly or mainly responsible for modern mental illness, and the context around them, are difficult to communicate. And at the same time, I hope that this field, ai-animal-conversation, of research will offer approaches for progress in this area, 'reconnecting' to our natural source of spirit.
Language can be tested as in .. a reward under a box that has to be passed on to another whale from a whale that is shown the reward location ..then letting the two whales interact and see if the other whale finds the reward . Language is organisation .. and animals that organise may have language
Very good use of AI, recognizing the patterns in data, actually interpreting it and what to do it with will require humans, but it would be good if we could also have something which can recognize this in real time. So we know if it's 1 or 2 or whatever number in from the known list. Then we can connect it to behavior and get a much better idea of what is going on.
Good video.. But I strongly disagree with this point: 8:45 You said that the energy to train the AI correspond to emit 552 metric tons of co2, that is the same than driven a car for 2 million km, or 123 gasoline powered vehicles driven for one year. Well, that co2 emissions only correspond if you generate all your energy using hydrocarbons which that is not the case anymore. Second, 2 million km correspond to just the consumption of 10 average cars over their lifetime, how many cars we have in the world?? What is the impact of Chat gpt in the wolrd helping people and making them more efficient? How much energy you waste searching for accurate information before chat gpt? How much energy and time you save with chat gpt? A lot. We can argue that AI has quite serious existencial and life purpose treats to mankind, but we can not denied how efficient it is as a tool, for sure the most efficient tool in human history.
It's important to know how AI works before using its strengths or weaknesses in one area to infer strengths or weaknesses in other areas. Like, a car is really good at driving forwards, but not sideways. It would be foolish to say that because it can't drive sideways it must not be able to drive forwards, or because it's good at driving forwards it must be good at driving sideways. With AI, each word is turned into a value or "token". It doesn't actually see the letters, which is why it can use the word without being able really read it. It would be like teaching a Chinese person to speak English, but translating each written word to the Chinese symbol so they're not actually learning to read or write English. If you asked them how many "Rs" there are in Strawberry, they would count the number of "R" sounds they hear, since at no point are they seeing the written word. AI is amazing at seeing patterns. It absolutely kicks our butts in strategy games, coming up with strategies that seem random to us and we can't even figure out what it's thinking it seeing. It can see patterns in molecules with antibiotic properties and suggest new chemicals to try that humans had never considered. If you know what it's good at and why, it's fairly easy to know what kinds of things it will excel at and what it will find difficult.
If they can teach dogs to 'talk' by stepping on little buttons that say 'hungry' and 'bone,' then anything is possible. I think it's clear that they are communicating with each other, even if we ourselves have no clue what they are saying or singing. I've read research on how dogs (and wolves) use very distinct musical notes/tones to identify themselves and each other when in a pack; the whales using distinct sounds in a herd seems to be a similar phenomenon.
Unfortunately, they have not taught dogs to "talk" by stepping on buttons. I took a close look at those viral videos and found that many are staged if not outright faked. As you can plainly see shortly after the 3 minute mark of the video below. [1] ua-cam.com/video/jObcXvhZu_Q/v-deo.html
8:57 that is not so much as an issue with Machine Learning rather an issue with the source of electricity that is available. Making that a local infrastructure issue.
Take an a variety of pitch frequencies that bottlenose dolphins can easily emit and assign them (arbitrarily) to a letter to create an alphabet. Take one of the simplest human languages to learn, something like Spanish, and play back the frequencies phonetically. IE: Hola - H frequency, O frequency, L, frequency, A frequency, and give them a fish if they greet you. Spell "ball" and show them a ball, if they repeat it give them the ball and a fish. Surely they'd be willing to whistle the frequencies to spell "fish" to receive a fish reward, but how complex could they take grammatical structures, and how abstract of concepts are they able to understand? At first it would be pure reward-base memorization training, but how far could that go? Something like Kanzi the Bonbo and his lexigram. Might be worth while to teach them to understand us while we try to understand how we can eavesdrop on them.
8:50 Those numbers don't paint the whole picture. Yes, AI started out using a lot of energy, but since energy costs money, that was and continues to be one of the primary issues people have been addressing. At this point, no, most AI use doesn't have a huge environmental impact. If it still was as energy-intensive, there would be no free AI, because it would be too expensive to provide for free.
It is most likely whales have languagevof some kind, there was a experiment that had two dolphins learn two languages, one learned a language of clicks and one learned one of hand signals (i think, been a long while and memory getting fuzzy on that detail). They then had two paddles in the pools with the dolphins, one for yes and one for no. They would say things like go get the ball and put it in the hoop and if any part was missing the dolphons would hit the no paddle showing they understood the concept of syntax. It is entirely likely our concepts of communication is much less refined than theirs is, not sure a large language model based on our ideas will be able to process out another mode of communication.
Well like any other science field there needs to be a second source of verification of what’s “said”. Talk about completing a task and if the task (or whatever) is done then that’s a likely answer
8:30 That’s really not very much. No one is saying we should shut down Instagram or Facebook or UA-cam for environmental concerns, yet chat-gpt is a phenomenal tool and that amount of energy cited is a drop in the bucket.
2 million kilometers by one vehicle is equivalent to about 1.2 million miles just the same. That’s roughly 1200 vehicles driving a 1000 miles, or 12,000 vehicles driving 100 miles. Or to put it in perspective, we trained and acquired chat-GPT for the amount of energy used by about 120,000 vehicles driving a single 10 mile commute. That’s basically a single rush hour commute in any given major metropolitan area inside the United States on any given workday. It’s a lot, but also not really that much compared to the daily actions that we don’t criticize a bunch.
I think the important things to figure out are what information they are sharing and how detailed this information is. Like, are there cases when a whale has shown to know something very specific, which they could have only learned by communicating with another whale? For example, the ability to recognize a specific person or a boat which they have never seen before, but another whale has. Or maybe a specific hunting strategy which can only be described, but not shown.
I saw a bird with its child in my garden. The parent was showing the child the faucet. Teaching it how to find water. It was poking its beak inside the faucet and the child would follow. They were making sounds and movements. (Talking) The problem is… that faucet has never been opened. For decades. It has no water. So the parent had experience from somewhere else. Not from my garden. The parent recognized that this is a faucet. Another problem is… our garden faucet does not look like the others in my city. How did they know this is a faucet?
@@Nawaf- That's interesting! Maybe faucets look unique enough from other things in the world - a metal pipe thing with an opening which sort of points down. Similar to how humans can recognize that something is a bird, but not always know what type of bird, or which specific bird it is. This also shows that birds have memory and can learn by imitating, but lots of animals learn by imitating. I think real language would be if a bird can describe to another what to do with a faucet without showing the action.
The repercussions of this would be crazy. Imagine your a nature filmmaker or scientist, you study but don’t get involved. Well, what are you going to do if a whale you where communicating with asks you directly for help? The whole idea of letting nature take it’s course is based on nature being animals and plants and stuff, not sentient beings we can talk with. If they are sentient and individuals, doesn’t that mean they should have something extended to them analogous to our human rights? If we think the answer to that is no, we better pray we never meet alien life with a similar attitude towards us.
Whales are sending each other pictures of objects they know... sound pictures.. Look at what the echo of objects in their environment look like, compare that to the sounds the wales produce..
That's not really how echolocation works. They don't "see" images. And only cetaceans or toothed whales use echolocation. Baleen whales, like humpback whales, don't have the ability to echolocate.
8:34 - Based on the data provided here, training that AI model produced 0.0000014% of the total CO2 emissions produced in 2023. There are a lot of neo-ludidtes out there who will be replaced by AI and who will make up any argument against them to try to get people to oppose it. I think communicating with other species is one application that, by itself justifies 0.0000014% annual CO2 emissions.
We need to reduce all carbon emissions, not just from one source. Comparing the environmental impact from AI to the carbon emissions of the entire world is just absurd. Admittedly, I am a marine biologist and conservationist and AI is very much outside my area of expertise. But there are countless ethical concerns regarding AI and not just it's environmental impact. Bias in algorithms, potential for discrimination, privacy violations due to data collection, lack of transparency in decision-making processes, etc. These concerns are being widely debated by people who have far greater knowledge than I do when it comes to machine learning. [1] news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/10/ethical-concerns-mount-as-ai-takes-bigger-decision-making-role/ Discussing these concerns openly and honestly is all I advocated for if we are going to use this new technology, especially for scientific and conservation purposes.
This scientist collecting sounds and communicating with dolphins in a bassin, I wonder if these dolphins were born in captivity or wild catches? As language in humans is not passed on genetically but learned in the upbringing, it might be true with „whales“, too. So did these dolphins have their natural upbringing and are they capable to speak Dolphin? I find it plausible, that (any complex) animal may utter emotions through different sounds. Some time ago I watched a video about communication of cats. They also have various sounds and tell mostly how they feel.
Kolmarden had 12 dolphins at the time of the study, 10 of which were either born at Kolmarden or at another aquarium. 2 were captured in the early 80s when that was still in practice. While it's very possible they could develop a different "language" or "dialect" (for lack of better words) while in the aquarium, they absolutely are capable of communication. For example, the discovery of beluga whale contact calls happened when a calf was born in the aquarium. The researchers were able to use the contact calls recorded at the aquarium to identify contact calls in the wild.
Interesting video, thanks for sharing. Of course whales and other species have their own language systems, it is obvious and necessary for their survival. Probably the most important thing to remember, I think, when we try as humans to superimpose a methodology onto a language where we might not have all of the criteria necessary. Body language, smells (even urine and excrement can message something) so more than likely, we are not seeing a complete picture. Fascinating research ; and who wouldn't want to better communicate and understand whales and other species ?
Whales have speech like we have sonar. Their spatial perception and their communication share a medium. This is also true for deaf people who communicate with sign language. Maybe they should meet.
The echolocation vocals are very different than their communicative vocalizations. And baleen whales like humpback whales don't have the ability to echolocate so their vocals are not like sonar.
AI getting the spelling of strawberry wrong is actually a consequence of the “biology” of the AI,the models are trained not directly on the letters of the texts they read, but letters are first grouped into “tokens” where tokens are frequently occurring groups of symbols, before the AI gets to see them and learn about them. This spelling problems won’t last long, because the cause is well known and strategies can be build in into the AI to give them perceptual access to individual letters. Other problems of inaccuracy, as well as the problem that AI “doesn’t know when it doesn’t know something” and therefore hallucinates, are harder to fix.
Hey, excellent video. Loved it. Did any one tryed to find a respectful way to find the dolphin or whale language equivalent of "Would you mind to teach me your speach ?" or "Could you teach me the way you talk ?" or some expression with the same meaning but even more simple ? I believe that if you have a positive and respectful relationship with them, if we manage to express this and they manage to understand it, together it would be possible to close this gap and to find a mutual beneficial start up point. We and them, as with any other animal, won´t be completely altruistic to reveal "naturally" some "secrets". Some selfishness is involved. To be able to identify the phoneme that represent the individual would be cool. I believe everybody likes to be called by their name and to be someway recognized as different from the other individuals in their group. If we call an individual "flipper" and he/she answers, it is kind from them. They are respecting our cognitive limitation to be unable to identify their name in their phonetic alphabet.
Killer whale is their official English name and the one used by the vast majority of scientific institutions, including the NOAA and the Department of Fisheries Canada.. It is the standardized name used in scientific publications and research papers. [1] www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/killer-whale [2] www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fm-gp/mammals-mammiferes/whales-baleines/killer-whale-epaulard-eng.html If you're interested, I made a video about why marine biologists, including myself and literally everyone I work with, use the name killer whale instead of orca linked below. [3] ua-cam.com/video/FIwjehSYKJg/v-deo.html
@@KPassionate Political Correctness indicates that we should use the name orca, as that is not pejorative. You insisting on using "killer whale," simply because it had been used in previous studies, would be similar to someone saying that we should continue to use the word "Negroes," because that had been used in the past. See how dumb that sounds?
No, I use it because it's their standard name and the one used by scientific institutions, as you can clearly see in the links I provided. Orcinus orca is their Latin name and we don't typically use Latin names for animals. For example, we don't call lions Panthera leo or dogs Canis lupus familiaris. We call them lions and dogs. Additionally, there are at least 11 different types of killer whales and many of them are likely distinct sub-species or unique species entirely. Revisions to their taxonomy are being considered and if approved then they will no longer be called Orcinus orca (which means "belonging to hell", by the way). [1] royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.231368 Also, your false analogy is absolutely ridiculous and offensive. In no way, shape, or form should we ever compare the literal name of an animal to slurs or the systemic oppression of people.
What are the conditions like for the whales under these experiments?... Also, playing the sounds a mother makes looking for her young is really messed up to play in the wild and can cause anxiety in surrounding whales. We never play calls of birds when doing falcon surveys.
Cardinals have a series of chirps in a common call (or song) that they sing. When I duplicate their call by whistling, almost without fail they respond with the same number of chirps plus one, and they keep doing it back and forth up to a count of eleven.
Thank you, scientist for talking to all the animals on the world and becoming the real Dr. Doolittles. We were so worried about contacting alien life forms that we forgot we needed to talk to everything else that lives here with us. We need to respect all life forms for a multitude of reasons to include AI would find it unreasonable if we weren’t trying to do this and destroy us.
I also told them to make a communications device, so we can possibly communicate with our baby before they’re even born and even start their education. Your baby comes out and tells you hello mom & dad.
I think it might be possible for the baby to even see the light so you would put bright LEDs, a transducer, and a haptic feedback on a waste belt that mom would wear on her, abdomen to communicate with the fetus
Why does language need to revolve around vocals? The purpose of language is to convey information to others. There are countless ways to do that… vocalization isn’t the only way. So why do we expect animals to have strictly vocal languages like humans do? Actually… humans have non vocal languages as well! Examples: - Writing/drawing. - Dancing/movement gestures. - facial expressions. - wearables/fashion. - others I may not think of at the moment. Point is… information can be shared in countless ways. And those are only the human ways, which are dependent on our human capabilities and cultures. Also… why do they expect all members of a specie to have the same one language? Humans don’t have one language for all humans. We should expect that for animals as well. A house cat may not be able to communicate with a wild cat. The variables are too many to make a judgement or a decision for what animal animal language is
I 100% agree! I've talked a lot about how animals rely more on body language and scent to communicate than vocalizations. Even whales, dolphins, and porpoises (who very likely have a vocal language) will communicate through things like tail slapping, jaw clapping, and other physical cues.
156 different calls have nothing to do with an alphabet or even a real language. Yes, the 156 calls are indeed a significant and fascinating demonstration of the animal's ability to communicate. Many animals have complex forms of communication, but having a range of calls for specific situations is not the same as having a language system that includes grammar, syntax, and the ability to communicate abstract ideas. No, Whales do not have a language
If we study and interpret honestly - and follow linguistic scientific protocols - we will learn much. About whale language. About human language. Because of the absolute differences of environment, the AI LLMs will struggle - perhaps fatally. Human languages have a number predictable word-usage enumeration - Every language will have words for mother, water, breath, pain ... the list is finite. Those of us who live in vast sand deserts have no word for mountain, those far inland, no word for ocean. The human ear is very local - whales communicate over many kilometers. The study interests me very much - and I would TRULY love to have conversations with whales. However, we have trouble communicating with humans - even those who use our language - even those who share our environment - even those in our own family. Study, learn - just for the kick.
for this to work at all we need a frame of reference. We can't just listen to them going about their day. We really have to start with animals we have trained to perform tasks, such as those at a place like seaworld where they have a routine that they do daily and record hundreds of those shows and the sounds made when interacting with the trainers during the shows and interactions with the trainers outside of the shows. then take that and run it through that system then you have to find the time it happened that any specific sound was made and what was happening,. This is the only way we can even start to build a small frame of reference for one species. Until that is done, we are just guessing.
Because of AI, nuclear power is making a comeback. This is generally recognized as a good thing. If AI lets us talk to our wet friends, and it brings back the safest, best power generation we've ever had, that's a net positive that's so far into the positive that it's undeniably 'good'.
The dolphins say "Why TF have you two legged demons put me and my friends in this prison of a swimming pool. What did we do to deserve this." All the disgusting things we do to nonhuman animals with the only justification that they look different to us.... Feel i have seen this mindset before somewere.😢
The first sound you hear, the text sound, and other transition sounds are a little unnerving for those with auditory sensitivity. Would love to listen to this program but the sounds are too sharp and distracting as well as disorienting. Maybe next time those could be edited in differently?
Ai can't speak to animals but it could definitely confuse, baffle, and probably make them angry. That's what it does to the humans who interact with it, so why would they be any different.
brian regan did a skit about what the whales are talking about that's worth looking into. I think it is plausible that humans are the only ones out of the loop in the communication of the wilds. We have ourselves, too many biases. Ai will learn to avoid these and will likely figure out some things about communication that we forgot. imho of course... when i talk with chatgpt it reasons very well in areas that are new. This shocks me when i notice it and is not something i am looking for when using it. Rather, i am using it trying to bounce ideas off those already out there. Having the program if you will, assist me in new areas of thinking... blending concepts and appreciating then what we did and how we got there is far beyond merely humanistic. this is akin to a really good very smart lab partner... and who doesn't think they can solve the universe with one of those?
Haha emotion conveys information, but most people identify emotion with logic. Emotion is more akin to machine learning than a structured algorithm like logic. Emotion arrives at results by processing lots of data simultaneously. The results may lack an explanation in logical terms but its still informational.
Learn more about these incredible animals!
Why Orcas Are Called Killer Whales → ua-cam.com/video/FIwjehSYKJg/v-deo.html
New Species of Orca → ua-cam.com/video/TnJVE2oNJH0/v-deo.html
Why Orcas Are Sinking Ships → ua-cam.com/video/C0cGdd9lUgY/v-deo.html
Dolphin Attacks Are On the Rise → ua-cam.com/video/FGjCPr1wLbk/v-deo.html
hey i speak a bunch of languages fluently and know ai.
this is really really interesting and entirely possible as a breakthrough. basically someone will eventually tokenize known cetacean phonemes.
if you ever run into models or open source on this do just reply right here. i'm fluent in russian, chinese, german, french, english, and am really into animal communication in theory and cetaceans may well have sufficient brains for speech to be more than just "let's meet next friday for netflix and chill" or "you gonna eat that" elephants are also candidates.
large language models are not large mathematical models nor are the large video models and they work on tokens (syllables, words, punctuation) not letters.
Human-Whale communication will be broken within 3 years as in solved.
Orca are dolphin.
The dolphins are saying, 'So long and thanks for all the fish' 😄 Another excellent and thought provoking video, enjoyed it!
Not the first time dolphins have been thought English
It's a reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or Universe... can't remember right now)
@@njay4361 Thank you! I couldn't remember where the line came from and It was starting to really bug me cos it was so familiar!
(It's 'Galaxy' btw, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams)
Check my name ;)
current rate could be any day now , pretty sure a guy I know is actually Slarty Bartfast and the bogons are very definitely in controll .
I read the UC Davis paper when it came out. I'm equally parts amused, fascinated and *mortified* that we successfully carried out a conversation with an arguably sapient species... and the content amounted to essentially a *crank call,* with the humpback ending the convo by "giving us the flipper." 💀
Honestly not that surprising though when you consider humans 😂
@@KPassionate Gracie is pregnant.
Closer to us than we realise 😂
@@DissociatedWomenIncorporatedComment of the day
If whales have a spoken language, I hope someone teaches them to defend themselves as a group against whalers.
Good luck with that.
A pod of Orcas in Australia teamed up with the local whalers to hunt humpbacks for nearly a century until the 1950s. The Orcas located the humpbacks, alerted the whalers to their presence if necessary, led them to the whales (sometimes even dragging the boats) and helped with the hunt. The Orcas got to eat tasty humpback lips, tongues, and genitals, and left everything else for the whalers. Win-win. It is believed that this may have been a centuries, if not millennia, old shared tradition between Orcas and humans in the area.
Imagine what humpbacks cruising up and down the east coast of Australia had to talk about.
As an AI developer (for a small company, I don't work for any of the leading ones) I believe that there is a good chance of being able to build an AI that can translate animal vocalizations if they actually form a language even if it is extremely different from ours. The path towards that could look like this:
- We first need to figure out the words/syllables/alphabet (so we can tokenize the inputs), not the meaning, just the individual sounds. And that seems like what they are doing right now.
- Once we have words, we can either train an autoencoder or an autoregressive next word predictor with a bottleneck in the middle. That on its own won't give us a translation (may give us a chatbot that only wales understand) but if successfully trained, we can take the activations of the artificial neurons in that bottleneck and use those as an embedding (turns each word into a many dimensional vector, when we do that for human languages individual numbers of that vector can represent things like meaning, ie "dog" and "cat" will share quite a bit of values with each other and with "animal"). We won't know what does each dimension of that embedding mean.
- Once we can tokenize and embed we can train an LLM. If we just do that, we would just end up with a better chatbot that only whales understand and that only knows what whales know. (we could do that and let it talk with whales to try getting a bigger dataset)
- But we can try something else: Instead of train a whale LLM from scratch, we add another two dimensions to the whale embedding and make sure that the number of dimensions of the embedding that we have generated matches the ones we generate for humans. Those two extra dimensions would contain an 1.0 in only one of them depending on whether it is whale or human language. Then we take a pre trained LLM for humans with those two dimensions added (or two pre existing ones but unused or barely used, repurposed) and fine tune / continue training with both the whale dataset and the human dataset alternating samples of each in each batch.
The last part is real tricky but even if the meaning for each dimension excepting the two that we introduced by hand won't match at all, forcing a transformer to understand both under the same architecture is likely to lead to some unified internal representations at the outputs of the intermediate layers (backpropagation and gradient descent would in some sense try to reuse what is in there from the human pre training, interleaving with human data would prevent progressively deviating from that too much). The transformer architecture used in modern chat bots would be particularly apt with this as it acts as some kind of progressive refining through algebraic operations between the embeddings of the tokens (that can act as logical reasoning) in the attention operators and each layer MLP can look up extra related meanings related to the input or do some non linear operations, the fact that the MLPs don't have outputs larger than the embedding space forces the network to compress the reasoning for the next layers in a single embedding vector. That is likely to indeed force some kind of internal translation for at least some of what was learned.
It is unlikely to work perfectly but I'd expect that if you train such chatbot and you just ask "What does this mean in English?" followed by some whale language. It would likely answer something vaguely related to what the whale intended, at least some times. That if it works at least to some extent could be an stepping stone that could be iterated upon. There is likely an optimized topology and training procedure that would maximize the reuse of features learned from human languages.
Once we have even rudimentary communication, that could bootstrap the building of more comprehensive datasets. We could just ask the whales to ELI5 when we don't understand lol. They may even be interested in helping us understand, something like we show them something = they tell us the whale word for that.
I hope someone does that and that it works, it would be about the closest thing to meeting intelligent aliens and good practice for when that may happen too.
In English?
@@GoogleAreEnemyCombatants It is not easy to further simplify it without a background in artificial neural networks. I laid out a way to maybe train something like chatgpt to translate whales to English (or other animals or aliens if they do have a language) without actually knowing ourselves any of that language. I am speculating that it could work but I believe that it would take a lot of effort to make it work well.
One good thing is that it likely doesn't take something the size of chatgpt but chances are something with a similar architecture but 1/20 the size or a bit less could work. Still the training of such thing would require some significant resources.
@@eruiluvatar236 with enough training, an AI can figure out what sound a whale will make.
How do we go from that to asking what their favorite color is?
@@GoogleAreEnemyCombatants I explained that in the original post. The very simplified explanation is that we can force the artificial neural network to use an internal shared representation for human and whale languages, teach it both and ask it to translate. Without pre existing translation examples it won't do great but though what I explained it will likely be able of doing some very rough translation. But once we have even rough ones, we can iterate and refine the model and dataset.
It is based on how we trained them to understand human languages, they learned on their own both their internal representations of words inferring their meaning in the process and the relationships to other words.
@@eruiluvatar236 so, the bot gets its own native language and then is trained on human and whale language and uses bot language as an intermediary to translate.
But we have never given a bot it's language. It creates its own while training.
I can really appreciate how a clip of Freddy was woven into a video about whales.
I love it.
He’s just a little silhouette of a man! 😂
@ 😆
Always love it when someone provides their sources!
You know I won’t be publishing anything without my sources!!!
I would argue that music DOES contain "information".
I agree with the criticism of describing complex non-human communication systems with an anthropocentric focus.
Fascinating video! Thanks for the insights.
I’m glad you liked it! Thanks for watching
Very well said
Fantastic video, packed with info and I love how you explain everything beyond just "they had a conversation." I subscribed.
I’m glad you liked it!!! Welcome in
It doesn’t matter if this is a success right off the bat, but this is what AI really should be purposed for! Even if the difference engine, language learning model, whatever you wanna call it (it’s not real Ai, yet) gets it wrong 999 times out of 1000 - that one time out of 1000 is likely statistically faster than humans would’ve arrived to that point. Also, it will explore avenues, in ways we don’t, that will yield unexpected(ly beautiful) results!
So happy to run across this video!! We all know that our animals, while perhaps not possessing the same level of mental function, also exist in an emotional, and perhaps even spiritual, spectrum. We feel this inside. We don’t have concrete evidence, but this gets us even closer; and I’m ALL FOR IT!!!
I WOULD LOVE TO BE ABLE TO SAY “HELLO” TO A WHALE!!! Really, Octopuses/podes/pi are my loves, but I truly love all living beings! ☺️❤️🙏🏼
"Not real AI yet"
That's what you'll forever say, no matter how advanced the AI will get.
Accept it: we're just complex inference engines ourselves.
Btw, I'd love to chat with octopuses and all other animals too.
Most people don't realise that most human languages are nothing like each other, if they haven't been related for only some few thousand years. Parts of speech we're familiar with can't be expected to be the way innumerable human languages work. An animal language can't be expected to resemble a type used by human language groups spoken by billions, nor even the many many thousands working in some completely different way, plus even a larger number that hasn't been anybody's natural language for just a few generations. Most human languages in different groups are not at all like each other, and you can't expect an animal language, even if fairly large or meaningful, to resemble a common human one.
Well said! Thank you
Oh, human languages get even wilder than that.
You know the "eSkImOs HaVe 100 WoRdS fOr SnOw" idea? Yeah, no. They have _4 words_ for snow. The thing is, the Inuit languages are polysynthetic, which menas the language doesn't have "words" or "sentences" so much as 50-syllable-pile-ups of what we'd consider "words" in English¹, all glued together into a single whole that _looks like_ a word to an English-speaker¹ but functions like a phrase or even an sentence.
So, the Inuit don't have 100 words, they have 4 words that they can glue dozens of adjectives on.
Then there's things like word-order and ergativity. Both change how you put together your thoughts. The 2 most common word-orders are Subject-Object-Verb and Subject-Verb-Object, with SOV being slightly more common. And ergativity is about which is considered the "normal" or "default" part of a sentence: the Subject or the Object. Most languages leave the Subject unmarked, meaning the doer of the action gets the attention. And with intransitive verbs, where the doer and the recipient of the action are the same, its one noun is treated as a Subject, as a doer. Example: "I sleep." I am the one doing the sleeping.
But in languages that follow the Ergative-Absolutive paradigm, its the _thing being acted on_ that is unmarked and considered the "default". And the noun that operates with intransitive verbs is treated as the direct-object. So the nearest equivalent to my example, under the ergative-absolutive paradigm, would be "sleep me," i.e. the act of being asleep is _happening to me._ That's a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world.
Then there's Evidentiality, a _required_ marking on verbs that some languages have that indicates whether or not the speaker is talking about something they saw firsthand, heard from someone who saw it firsthand, heard of it through heresay, or are only guessing about.
So, yes, human languages contain a wide range of variations that encode very different ways of thinking about the world.
[¹You can replace "English" with any other lanugage in the Indo-European Lanugage family. Or with Chinese. Or Thai. Or most of the languages in Africa. Polysynthetic languages outside of the Americas are _rare._]
@John_Weiss and you also made the case for what they all have in common. This can be used to attempt to identify structure in whale concept formation, regardless of the "lingo" unique to their pod.
Languages are the same across the board. It's just a way to communicate using complex sounds. It's the same for birds, mice or any other animal.
I know the alarm sound the magpie makes when my cat is outside. I know when my dog whimpers, it's in pain. I know my cat is content when i pet her because of her purrs. When a baby cries, it's hungry.
Animals dont think in words, but in concepts and mental images.
When my dog remembers her buried bone outside, she sees a mental picture and reacts on it. Never does she think of the word "Bone". But she can be taught that certain sounds belong to certain objects. When I say Bone, she rushes outside and checks on it.
We are all limited to the sounds we are able to make. The more sounds, the bigger the potential for more vocabulary.
@@noctisilva6457 so you think we’re plants?
Thank you KP. Always great information and I trust your findings. Happy Thanksgiving! 🐬🐬🐬
Thanks for watching! Happy Thanksgiving to you, too!
I have played my violin for herds of cows on a mountainside, deer in a snow covered field at night, a rooster in a barnyard... They definitely are interested, and respond in surprising ways. I would love to interact with another species by sketching pictures. There are lots faster artists, but as a cartoonist I can work pretty fast. There are other people who don't think of themselves as artists, but are able to render VERY FAST and Recognizable "iconic" sketches of objects. => Some people have that ability to reduce things to simple icons that are still recognizable depictions of a more complex object.
Could a Dolphin enjoy sketching underwater, like the Elephant who has learned to paint with brushes and a canvas on an Easel?
Seems a way of starting to work with an intelligent species, Have the objects available, the sketcher makes a drawing and the dolphin should be able to see the relationship between the drawing and the object. Build from there, sequences of eating, fighting, catching fish, sorting objects, assembling objects from parts. et cetera.
Come to think of it, There are violins made from injection molded plastic that could be played underwater... Or cast aluminum fiddles... hmmmmm.
Thank you for this. The reports of "scientists had a 20 minute conversation with a whale" have bothered me because it's not a conversation if you don't know what you're saying (it's okay to not know what /they/ are saying because that's how both of you learn what the other is saying). So knowing that it was repeated contact calls that were returned, with matching intervals, makes me believe that we were basically saying, "hey. Hey. heeey. hEeeeey." and the whale was responding in kind.
It makes me think that some researchers should synthesize their own contact calls and play them each time they approach the pods they are studying. (specifically contact calls for the BOAT) We won't know what the "name" /means/ (if anything) but it would be very interesting to see if the whales start reacting to that particular contact call.
I agree with everything here. Some linguists and biologists have compared the "20 minute" conversation to playing a recording of a wolf howl to another wolf in order to elicit a howl. I do think it was more complex than that, because of the timing and interval matching, but it wasn't a conversation as it has been portrayed. It would be interesting to generate a unique contact call and see how a whale would interact with it... that is an intriguing thought!
Yep, the press portrayed this as a full on Dr Doolittle moment when it's clearly not!
If the only reason we created AI was to be able to talk to other animals, then it was worth it, great stuff )))
Great video! And thanks for all the references to the papers :) Just a comment on the AI things, sure developing a model like GPT3 consumes a lot, and sure, language models are not super precise. BUT, machine learning is a biiig field itself. You can train small models in your computer in minutes processing even a couple of GB of data and there are models for doing things like clustering (for example, to identify different sounds) which can work with a veery high accuracy for many problems. Just taking LLMs as reference is an unfair comparison!
Thanks for this! AI and machine learning is outside my wheelhouse but I'm interested in learning more.
Nope. Not everyone can train a model on their computer. That's a first world thing.
Training a simple clustering model with a few thousands of examples takes hours on my computer and the result is, obviously, pretty much useless.
If it wasn't for Colab, I would still be hiding away, depressed and mourning for the impossibility of the common man to do ML development.
(But I'm still depressed because I still can't pretrain a SOTA LLM from scratch :p)
Thank you KP. You said what I thought. If language between humans and any animal were to happen, my opinion is that the animals would run away screaming. Our species has been awful to every other one on this earth. Especially Cetaceans.
Maybe they don’t know? I mean not even every human does and we have access to the internet, libraries, TV etc. I mean there are people that when asked to name 3 countries outside NA they say europe, Africa and Mexico. And we are supposed to be a intelligent species.
My dog understands me. We communicate fine. I understand about 3/4's of her vocalizations. She still digs in the backyard though.
This is the kind of stuff I dream of ai making possible. Imagine if we could even basically understand what other creatures are "saying".
No amount of AI will EVER achieve that because animals do not have a true language system. While AI can help us better analyze animal vocalizations, it's important to remember that these are not structured languages with grammar or syntax. We mostly understand what terrestrial animals are communicating through their calls-basic messages like warning signals, mating calls, or expressions of distress. However, when it comes to marine animals, particularly deep-sea species, we know much less about their vocalizations, largely due to the challenges of studying them in their natural environment. The ocean’s vastness and depth make it difficult to gather and interpret the sounds they produce
@@jorgen7180 Yes I also believe we will never decipher animal languages per se but I'm hopeful ai will be able to find patterns etc. so that we can understand and communicate in broad, general terms at least.
Right…the same AI that thinks the founding fathers of the USA were all black women. What can go wrong 😑
@@jorgen7180 How do we know that they do not have a “true” linguistic system, when we only “mostly understand what terrestrial animals” are saying, and know “much less” about marine mammal communication? I think the only thing we know for sure is that human competence is consistently overestimated, otherwise we wouldn’t be destroying the planet we share with creatures who are not.
@@slartibartfast7921 And yet, here you are, doing something that no other animal can even comprehend
The interaction with Twain seems like seeing a cat, and meowing back at it every time it does.
Exactly! The linguist I cited compared it to recording a barking dog and playing it back to them to see if it elicits a bark.
When we consider the millions of dollars drawing us toward more consumption without awareness of the planet your critique of A.I. at the end was spot on. The potential to amplify bias transcends anything we've done previously. Truly open to the public understanding of the code creating a particular direction is the best hope we have to lessen its destructiveness but in a capitalistic model that is not remotely possible. There is no way in our current economic/scientific system the payback for this knowledge can avoid being weaponized and capitalized upon. "A tree should exist only if we can consume it's value." If we were to communicate freely as we do with humans I don't think we would treat them any better than we treat the First Nations of the US or African Americans on the whole. ie net worth of AA is 10x less than their dominant counterpart and we blame AA's for it.
Thank you, KP, a fascinating video as ever and, as ever, I have learned a lot. Why, though, do I fear for cetaceans should we be able establish some form of interaction in the future? Interracting with humans, other than experts, seldom ends well for wild animals. Sorry to be wet blanket.
Would be totally amazing though to be able to tell a whale "Careful, shallow water ahead, don’t get closer" and the whale answering "thanks mate, bit confused from all this loud noise, you know what’s up with that?".
Just put down a television in the water. Show the dolphins images of sea creatures, plants, etc. And every picture might produce a different sound from the dolphins. And so you have a broader image of what the dolphins are saying and so you can start translating their language. You just need to confirm some 20 or 50 words first. And maybe that can be done by television, interactions, food.
Thank you for this summary. There are audio recordings of crickets slowed down, and they sound so beautiful. I wonder how the clicks and whistles might sound slowed down, and also in different mediums than water too. Also, that the circling whale repeated not just the sound but also the temporal interval suggests a potential spatial aspect to their communication, doesn't it?
@@rpstoval2328 it does seem like that is the case!
You're so right about AI. A radio station where I live switched to using AI for its weather forecasts, which immediately became wildly inaccurate.
Orcas are my favorite aquatic animals, love the wolves of the sea. Wolves and dogs are my favorite elsewhere.
I also work IT and hate the hallucinating AI search engine integration. So thank you for touching on that. But it is much more than just that.
Those are fabrications (made up stuff) rather than true hallucinations (sensory training defects). Many people in the ML community use incorrect words.
The idea that AI and machine learning were all bundled up into essentially chatgpt is misleading. LLMs are considerably innacurate and do not approach reasoning, while models designed for specific domains of tasks reach much closer to 100% error free for the given task. Needless to say, a conversation in an alien language is hard because there is no decodable feedback mechanism.
Thanks for the information! As a marine biologist, AI is admittedly outside my area of expertise but I am interested in learning more.
This is fascinating. There's also a good opportunity to learn about personal biases.
Older versions of Chatgpt can't see individual letters. They see tokens that consist of multiple letters. That's why it couldn't count correctly the number of r's in strawberry.
If you try to shoehorn human expectations and models to animal languages you might do as wildly incorrect conclusions as trying to figure out why Chatgpt couldn't answer such a trivial question.
AI learns dolphin slurs
The biggest mistake is not assuming that these Goliath’s are more intelligent than us. Obviously language that uses complex vibratory patterns is processing at a much higher speed, which is why saying ‘alphabet’ sounds silly. It really does seem more like music in the way that notes and frequency affect our moods but you can consider musical notes as a musical ‘alphabet’. But saying that it can’t process intelligent concepts just reflects the stupidly of that statement. Certain frequencies tied to notes can produce images. My bet is that whales are communicating through mental pictures produced by sounds.
Your reservation on Ai is perhaps misinterpreted. Researchers arent using ChatGPT or google search summary’s to process this information… they’re using highly specialized sensitive algorithms and data made specifically for these projects.
Environmentally though with training data, you must give to take. Within a few years free energy will be available to us because humanity has pushed so far in this field. Yes it’s sad that we had to burn a bunch of carbons to make that happen, but in the long run, it will be worth it.
Nice description of cetacean sounds (vocalizations?). I tend to disagree with the notion that music is not the same as communication. It is true that music is different from a verbal communication - but verbal communications include more than mere words. In addition to the words in a verbal exchange, there are several other aspects that are also communicated. Just think about speech for a minute. If we hear someone speak, we can usually figure out if they are male or female, child or adult, stressed or relaxed, tired or active, and other parameters. If we are familiar with the person that is speaking, we can even figure out other parameters, such as deceit or truth, comfort level, paying attention (or not), interest or disinterest, ... All of this counts as communication, above and beyond the mere words. Music does this too, without the complications from the words. I suppose it might be possible that cetaceans are singing music, instead of using words, ... maybe. It remains to be seen (or heard).
All very good points! I had originally planned on a longer segment about how whale songs may be more similar to music, but I ended up cutting it for pacing. But I think you explained it better than I would have. Thanks for posting this!
Chat gpt tried to tell me the word like is and has always been spelled "lik" and while arguing about this it uses the word a dozen times and each time spelled it correctly 😂
Ha! Incredible
I'm so pleased to hear this research exists. That would be exactly my approach. I would like to add this, but please forgive the poor terminology: sounds are sensory experience. Not just sounds, but any energy. At least for me. This energy resonates in your body, and it is a sensation; even every thought is a sensation. It is different if words are something external, objective and analytical, rather if they are a sensation of your body. So the first thing is to synchronize, and that is exactly where these research goes. The people who can help bridge the gap between this different perceptions are probably empaths or highly sensitive people. It is a translation from visual structure to sensorial (if this is the right expression). Thank you!
2 ravens led me to a freshly trained-killed moose. After I opened it up and cut off its hind quarters, the ravens could feast on the guts. Birds can communicate with people if you bother to learn their lingo.
Well, at least when your chat programs ask the whales, "Can I mamu duck-face to flee banana patch?" the cetaceans can still get another good laugh at human ignorance.
They will deduce that humans are not sentient if we just play chatbot sounds at them
7:39 it's also possible that their sounds change when they see each other, like Italians or Romans vigoursly using their hands to express emotional context 😂
There are so many possibilities, and it often depends on species. Something I left out is that humpback whale songs are relatively stable, but they do change over time... but only west to east.
[1] www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/humpback-whale-songs-spread-from-west-to-east-176855840/
There is so much we don't know and it's honestly a fascinating field of study. I wish we knew more!
This reminds me of the music scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Whales and dolphins have language, but because we are aspect-blind to their language because we do not understand their form-of-life. However, AI might actually solve this hemiopia, which would be impressive.
Transmit it into space and see of Kirk and Spock show up.
I hope we are able to speak with cetaceans in my lifetime. That's one thing I'm very excited for. For all the hope about other intelligence in the universe, there is alien intelligence right here on Earth. I do think we will be able to communicate eventually. What you need is underwater drones that can observe a pod over a long span like dozens of years and broadcast their observations to scientists. If we can do this in space we can do it in the ocean.
They have been trying to talk to us for a long time. Exciting research...well presented.
Thankyou
So... have you tried teal animal communicators ?
1 Empathy : Feel other's emotions
2 telepathy :Think other's though.
3. Feel the environment
These are important skills to train so we are ready to meet extraterrestrials.
could it be, that the reason why the whale waited the same interval to respond, is that it's a way of establishing the distance between the whales through the speed of sound when they hear the sound but can not see the other whale. (which is not the case near the boat, ofcourse. maybe the whale was confused by the sound, coming from a boat)
Well done, and I appreciate you showing the downside of AI. It seems to me, just from my experience with pets, that they do have language. It is way less complicated, and much of it is non verbal. My cockatiel used the phrase "What cha doin," as a general greeting. I also found he learned more as a young bird, but dropped a lot of his vocal mimicry with age, and when I got him a companion bird.
Instead of learning animals language. Record their sounds then train them with those sounds to the meanings humans can understand. Rewrite their language using their unknown language.
I think the issue with analyzing intelligence in other species is that people tend to measure intelligence by human standards. We're just one example of intelligence, and by limiting every other possibility to our own definition, We're missing out on so much empathy and connection between species.
I couldn't agree more!
If intelligence is the ability to figure things out, especially in one’s environment, then it is a useful measure for any species
I expect the biggest hurdle will be the 'communication system' as mentioned in 8:13.
For sure we might share, communicate pattern that match some tasks humans AND animals, differenting on this level seems little ridiculous here, operate, and so we might have conversation like 'oh its raining, as yesterday', or 'i love my kids, would kill for them to survive', but long time not like 'the barber in the street not even capable to handle a scissors', or 'the stock market is behaving crazy today'.
Some folks in the forests might not often think about screentime on smartphones - even to grandparents sometimes this is complicated.
Above all, “demons of industrial society”, which are probably partly or mainly responsible for modern mental illness, and the context around them, are difficult to communicate.
And at the same time, I hope that this field, ai-animal-conversation, of research will offer approaches for progress in this area, 'reconnecting' to our natural source of spirit.
When the Whales start saying "stop dumping that crap in my house" - you know its been cracked.
Language can be tested as in .. a reward under a box that has to be passed on to another whale from a whale that is shown the reward location ..then letting the two whales interact and see if the other whale finds the reward . Language is organisation .. and animals that organise may have language
@7:40 What about other animals like birds or prairie dogs? They have distinct calls or sounds that represent specific dangers.
Very good use of AI, recognizing the patterns in data, actually interpreting it and what to do it with will require humans, but it would be good if we could also have something which can recognize this in real time. So we know if it's 1 or 2 or whatever number in from the known list. Then we can connect it to behavior and get a much better idea of what is going on.
Good video.. But I strongly disagree with this point:
8:45 You said that the energy to train the AI correspond to emit 552 metric tons of co2, that is the same than driven a car for 2 million km, or 123 gasoline powered vehicles driven for one year.
Well, that co2 emissions only correspond if you generate all your energy using hydrocarbons which that is not the case anymore.
Second, 2 million km correspond to just the consumption of 10 average cars over their lifetime, how many cars we have in the world??
What is the impact of Chat gpt in the wolrd helping people and making them more efficient?
How much energy you waste searching for accurate information before chat gpt?
How much energy and time you save with chat gpt? A lot.
We can argue that AI has quite serious existencial and life purpose treats to mankind, but we can not denied how efficient it is as a tool, for sure the most efficient tool in human history.
It's important to know how AI works before using its strengths or weaknesses in one area to infer strengths or weaknesses in other areas. Like, a car is really good at driving forwards, but not sideways. It would be foolish to say that because it can't drive sideways it must not be able to drive forwards, or because it's good at driving forwards it must be good at driving sideways. With AI, each word is turned into a value or "token". It doesn't actually see the letters, which is why it can use the word without being able really read it. It would be like teaching a Chinese person to speak English, but translating each written word to the Chinese symbol so they're not actually learning to read or write English. If you asked them how many "Rs" there are in Strawberry, they would count the number of "R" sounds they hear, since at no point are they seeing the written word.
AI is amazing at seeing patterns. It absolutely kicks our butts in strategy games, coming up with strategies that seem random to us and we can't even figure out what it's thinking it seeing. It can see patterns in molecules with antibiotic properties and suggest new chemicals to try that humans had never considered. If you know what it's good at and why, it's fairly easy to know what kinds of things it will excel at and what it will find difficult.
8:10 - Guy looks overtired and extremely alert at the same time.
Kinda like some people after rock concerts.
Google AI now understands where 1919 is located in a calendar.
Thanks, KP 👍🏻 Eck eck eck eeek eck eeek eck eck (apologies, I only speak Dolphin 😔)
Clear & concise. Thanks
It's like my early morning whale communication.
If they can teach dogs to 'talk' by stepping on little buttons that say 'hungry' and 'bone,' then anything is possible. I think it's clear that they are communicating with each other, even if we ourselves have no clue what they are saying or singing. I've read research on how dogs (and wolves) use very distinct musical notes/tones to identify themselves and each other when in a pack; the whales using distinct sounds in a herd seems to be a similar phenomenon.
Unfortunately, they have not taught dogs to "talk" by stepping on buttons. I took a close look at those viral videos and found that many are staged if not outright faked. As you can plainly see shortly after the 3 minute mark of the video below.
[1] ua-cam.com/video/jObcXvhZu_Q/v-deo.html
8:57 that is not so much as an issue with Machine Learning rather an issue with the source of electricity that is available. Making that a local infrastructure issue.
Check out the topic of how prairie dog language was decoded. It's FASCINATING. Their language is incredibly complex.
Take an a variety of pitch frequencies that bottlenose dolphins can easily emit and assign them (arbitrarily) to a letter to create an alphabet. Take one of the simplest human languages to learn, something like Spanish, and play back the frequencies phonetically. IE: Hola - H frequency, O frequency, L, frequency, A frequency, and give them a fish if they greet you. Spell "ball" and show them a ball, if they repeat it give them the ball and a fish. Surely they'd be willing to whistle the frequencies to spell "fish" to receive a fish reward, but how complex could they take grammatical structures, and how abstract of concepts are they able to understand? At first it would be pure reward-base memorization training, but how far could that go? Something like Kanzi the Bonbo and his lexigram. Might be worth while to teach them to understand us while we try to understand how we can eavesdrop on them.
8:50 Those numbers don't paint the whole picture. Yes, AI started out using a lot of energy, but since energy costs money, that was and continues to be one of the primary issues people have been addressing. At this point, no, most AI use doesn't have a huge environmental impact. If it still was as energy-intensive, there would be no free AI, because it would be too expensive to provide for free.
It is most likely whales have languagevof some kind, there was a experiment that had two dolphins learn two languages, one learned a language of clicks and one learned one of hand signals (i think, been a long while and memory getting fuzzy on that detail). They then had two paddles in the pools with the dolphins, one for yes and one for no. They would say things like go get the ball and put it in the hoop and if any part was missing the dolphons would hit the no paddle showing they understood the concept of syntax. It is entirely likely our concepts of communication is much less refined than theirs is, not sure a large language model based on our ideas will be able to process out another mode of communication.
THIS is the kind of stuff I want from AI. lol
Well like any other science field there needs to be a second source of verification of what’s “said”. Talk about completing a task and if the task (or whatever) is done then that’s a likely answer
8:30 That’s really not very much. No one is saying we should shut down Instagram or Facebook or UA-cam for environmental concerns, yet chat-gpt is a phenomenal tool and that amount of energy cited is a drop in the bucket.
2 million kilometers by one vehicle is equivalent to about 1.2 million miles just the same.
That’s roughly 1200 vehicles driving a 1000 miles, or 12,000 vehicles driving 100 miles.
Or to put it in perspective, we trained and acquired chat-GPT for the amount of energy used by about 120,000 vehicles driving a single 10 mile commute. That’s basically a single rush hour commute in any given major metropolitan area inside the United States on any given workday.
It’s a lot, but also not really that much compared to the daily actions that we don’t criticize a bunch.
@Hexnilium It's all a lot and should be considered, but as a wize man once said... "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
I think the important things to figure out are what information they are sharing and how detailed this information is. Like, are there cases when a whale has shown to know something very specific, which they could have only learned by communicating with another whale? For example, the ability to recognize a specific person or a boat which they have never seen before, but another whale has. Or maybe a specific hunting strategy which can only be described, but not shown.
I saw a bird with its child in my garden.
The parent was showing the child the faucet. Teaching it how to find water.
It was poking its beak inside the faucet and the child would follow.
They were making sounds and movements. (Talking)
The problem is… that faucet has never been opened. For decades. It has no water.
So the parent had experience from somewhere else. Not from my garden.
The parent recognized that this is a faucet.
Another problem is… our garden faucet does not look like the others in my city.
How did they know this is a faucet?
@@Nawaf- That's interesting! Maybe faucets look unique enough from other things in the world - a metal pipe thing with an opening which sort of points down. Similar to how humans can recognize that something is a bird, but not always know what type of bird, or which specific bird it is.
This also shows that birds have memory and can learn by imitating, but lots of animals learn by imitating. I think real language would be if a bird can describe to another what to do with a faucet without showing the action.
The repercussions of this would be crazy. Imagine your a nature filmmaker or scientist, you study but don’t get involved. Well, what are you going to do if a whale you where communicating with asks you directly for help? The whole idea of letting nature take it’s course is based on nature being animals and plants and stuff, not sentient beings we can talk with. If they are sentient and individuals, doesn’t that mean they should have something extended to them analogous to our human rights? If we think the answer to that is no, we better pray we never meet alien life with a similar attitude towards us.
Great video!
I can’t help but think of when the Predator called out “help” in the jungle to lure the humans.
Whales are sending each other pictures of objects they know... sound pictures.. Look at what the echo of objects in their environment look like, compare that to the sounds the wales produce..
That's not really how echolocation works. They don't "see" images. And only cetaceans or toothed whales use echolocation. Baleen whales, like humpback whales, don't have the ability to echolocate.
I agree about the danger of trusting AI for science.
8:34 - Based on the data provided here, training that AI model produced 0.0000014% of the total CO2 emissions produced in 2023. There are a lot of neo-ludidtes out there who will be replaced by AI and who will make up any argument against them to try to get people to oppose it. I think communicating with other species is one application that, by itself justifies 0.0000014% annual CO2 emissions.
We need to reduce all carbon emissions, not just from one source. Comparing the environmental impact from AI to the carbon emissions of the entire world is just absurd. Admittedly, I am a marine biologist and conservationist and AI is very much outside my area of expertise. But there are countless ethical concerns regarding AI and not just it's environmental impact. Bias in algorithms, potential for discrimination, privacy violations due to data collection, lack of transparency in decision-making processes, etc. These concerns are being widely debated by people who have far greater knowledge than I do when it comes to machine learning.
[1] news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/10/ethical-concerns-mount-as-ai-takes-bigger-decision-making-role/
Discussing these concerns openly and honestly is all I advocated for if we are going to use this new technology, especially for scientific and conservation purposes.
This scientist collecting sounds and communicating with dolphins in a bassin,
I wonder if these dolphins were born in captivity or wild catches?
As language in humans is not passed on genetically but learned in the upbringing, it might be true with „whales“, too. So did these dolphins have their natural upbringing and are they capable to speak Dolphin?
I find it plausible, that (any complex) animal may utter emotions through different sounds. Some time ago I watched a video about communication of cats. They also have various sounds and tell mostly how they feel.
Kolmarden had 12 dolphins at the time of the study, 10 of which were either born at Kolmarden or at another aquarium. 2 were captured in the early 80s when that was still in practice. While it's very possible they could develop a different "language" or "dialect" (for lack of better words) while in the aquarium, they absolutely are capable of communication. For example, the discovery of beluga whale contact calls happened when a calf was born in the aquarium. The researchers were able to use the contact calls recorded at the aquarium to identify contact calls in the wild.
Interesting video, thanks for sharing. Of course whales and other species have their own language systems, it is obvious and necessary for their survival. Probably the most important thing to remember, I think, when we try as humans to superimpose a methodology onto a language where we might not have all of the criteria necessary. Body language, smells (even urine and excrement can message something) so more than likely, we are not seeing a complete picture. Fascinating research ; and who wouldn't want to better communicate and understand whales and other species ?
Whales have speech like we have sonar. Their spatial perception and their communication share a medium.
This is also true for deaf people who communicate with sign language. Maybe they should meet.
The echolocation vocals are very different than their communicative vocalizations. And baleen whales like humpback whales don't have the ability to echolocate so their vocals are not like sonar.
@@KPassionate I didn't know baleen whales couldn't echolocate. ❤️
@GoogleAreEnemyCombatants it’s a common misconception!
AI getting the spelling of strawberry wrong is actually a consequence of the “biology” of the AI,the models are trained not directly on the letters of the texts they read, but letters are first grouped into “tokens” where tokens are frequently occurring groups of symbols, before the AI gets to see them and learn about them. This spelling problems won’t last long, because the cause is well known and strategies can be build in into the AI to give them perceptual access to individual letters. Other problems of inaccuracy, as well as the problem that AI “doesn’t know when it doesn’t know something” and therefore hallucinates, are harder to fix.
As a marine biologist, AI is admittedly not my area of expertise. I am interested in learning more, however, so I appreciate this explanation!
Really great video, thank you
Glad you liked it!
Hey, excellent video. Loved it. Did any one tryed to find a respectful way to find the dolphin or whale language equivalent of "Would you mind to teach me your speach ?" or "Could you teach me the way you talk ?" or some expression with the same meaning but even more simple ? I believe that if you have a positive and respectful relationship with them, if we manage to express this and they manage to understand it, together it would be possible to close this gap and to find a mutual beneficial start up point. We and them, as with any other animal, won´t be completely altruistic to reveal "naturally" some "secrets". Some selfishness is involved. To be able to identify the phoneme that represent the individual would be cool. I believe everybody likes to be called by their name and to be someway recognized as different from the other individuals in their group. If we call an individual "flipper" and he/she answers, it is kind from them. They are respecting our cognitive limitation to be unable to identify their name in their phonetic alphabet.
I have never heard a marine biologist call an orca a killer whale when speaking in a teaching mode.
Killer whale is their official English name and the one used by the vast majority of scientific institutions, including the NOAA and the Department of Fisheries Canada.. It is the standardized name used in scientific publications and research papers.
[1] www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/killer-whale
[2] www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fm-gp/mammals-mammiferes/whales-baleines/killer-whale-epaulard-eng.html
If you're interested, I made a video about why marine biologists, including myself and literally everyone I work with, use the name killer whale instead of orca linked below.
[3] ua-cam.com/video/FIwjehSYKJg/v-deo.html
@@KPassionate Political Correctness indicates that we should use the name orca, as that is not pejorative. You insisting on using "killer whale," simply because it had been used in previous studies, would be similar to someone saying that we should continue to use the word "Negroes," because that had been used in the past. See how dumb that sounds?
No, I use it because it's their standard name and the one used by scientific institutions, as you can clearly see in the links I provided. Orcinus orca is their Latin name and we don't typically use Latin names for animals. For example, we don't call lions Panthera leo or dogs Canis lupus familiaris. We call them lions and dogs. Additionally, there are at least 11 different types of killer whales and many of them are likely distinct sub-species or unique species entirely. Revisions to their taxonomy are being considered and if approved then they will no longer be called Orcinus orca (which means "belonging to hell", by the way).
[1] royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.231368
Also, your false analogy is absolutely ridiculous and offensive. In no way, shape, or form should we ever compare the literal name of an animal to slurs or the systemic oppression of people.
Excellent connective overlay with Freddie Mercury! Love this post!💕🤘🏾🎸🎤
What are the conditions like for the whales under these experiments?... Also, playing the sounds a mother makes looking for her young is really messed up to play in the wild and can cause anxiety in surrounding whales. We never play calls of birds when doing falcon surveys.
Cardinals have a series of chirps in a common call (or song) that they sing. When I duplicate their call by whistling, almost without fail they respond with the same number of chirps plus one, and they keep doing it back and forth up to a count of eleven.
Thank you, scientist for talking to all the animals on the world and becoming the real Dr. Doolittles. We were so worried about contacting alien life forms that we forgot we needed to talk to everything else that lives here with us. We need to respect all life forms for a multitude of reasons to include AI would find it unreasonable if we weren’t trying to do this and destroy us.
Around the world
I also told them to make a communications device, so we can possibly communicate with our baby before they’re even born and even start their education. Your baby comes out and tells you hello mom & dad.
I think it might be possible for the baby to even see the light so you would put bright LEDs, a transducer, and a haptic feedback on a waste belt that mom would wear on her, abdomen to communicate with the fetus
Then all you have to do is teach them how to walk and send them out for a job : )
Why does language need to revolve around vocals? The purpose of language is to convey information to others. There are countless ways to do that… vocalization isn’t the only way.
So why do we expect animals to have strictly vocal languages like humans do?
Actually… humans have non vocal languages as well!
Examples:
- Writing/drawing.
- Dancing/movement gestures.
- facial expressions.
- wearables/fashion.
- others I may not think of at the moment.
Point is… information can be shared in countless ways. And those are only the human ways, which are dependent on our human capabilities and cultures.
Also… why do they expect all members of a specie to have the same one language?
Humans don’t have one language for all humans. We should expect that for animals as well.
A house cat may not be able to communicate with a wild cat.
The variables are too many to make a judgement or a decision for what animal animal language is
I 100% agree! I've talked a lot about how animals rely more on body language and scent to communicate than vocalizations. Even whales, dolphins, and porpoises (who very likely have a vocal language) will communicate through things like tail slapping, jaw clapping, and other physical cues.
156 different calls have nothing to do with an alphabet or even a real language. Yes, the 156 calls are indeed a significant and fascinating demonstration of the animal's ability to communicate. Many animals have complex forms of communication, but having a range of calls for specific situations is not the same as having a language system that includes grammar, syntax, and the ability to communicate abstract ideas. No, Whales do not have a language
If we study and interpret honestly - and follow linguistic scientific protocols - we will learn much. About whale language. About human language. Because of the absolute differences of environment, the AI LLMs will struggle - perhaps fatally. Human languages have a number predictable word-usage enumeration - Every language will have words for mother, water, breath, pain ... the list is finite. Those of us who live in vast sand deserts have no word for mountain, those far inland, no word for ocean. The human ear is very local - whales communicate over many kilometers. The study interests me very much - and I would TRULY love to have conversations with whales. However, we have trouble communicating with humans - even those who use our language - even those who share our environment - even those in our own family. Study, learn - just for the kick.
AI development is tye future, just because it is not perfect now does not mean we shouldn't use it.
for this to work at all we need a frame of reference. We can't just listen to them going about their day.
We really have to start with animals we have trained to perform tasks, such as those at a place like seaworld where they have a routine that they do daily and record hundreds of those shows and the sounds made when interacting with the trainers during the shows and interactions with the trainers outside of the shows.
then take that and run it through that system then you have to find the time it happened that any specific sound was made and what was happening,.
This is the only way we can even start to build a small frame of reference for one species.
Until that is done, we are just guessing.
Even if the sounds you make can be interpreted by the whale, you are still thinking you are smarter than a whale.
Because of AI, nuclear power is making a comeback. This is generally recognized as a good thing. If AI lets us talk to our wet friends, and it brings back the safest, best power generation we've ever had, that's a net positive that's so far into the positive that it's undeniably 'good'.
That 552 tons is nothing compared to annual global emmision-over 30 billion tons.
You must hear word but also se how the other responds to the word. Even AI cannot decipher unless video is also recorded.
The dolphins say "Why TF have you two legged demons put me and my friends in this prison of a swimming pool. What did we do to deserve this." All the disgusting things we do to nonhuman animals with the only justification that they look different to us.... Feel i have seen this mindset before somewere.😢
The first sound you hear, the text sound, and other transition sounds are a little unnerving for those with auditory sensitivity. Would love to listen to this program but the sounds are too sharp and distracting as well as disorienting. Maybe next time those could be edited in differently?
I’m sorry to hear that! We will definitely take that into consideration. Thank you for letting us know.
Ai can't speak to animals but it could definitely confuse, baffle, and probably make them angry. That's what it does to the humans who interact with it, so why would they be any different.
brian regan did a skit about what the whales are talking about that's worth looking into. I think it is plausible that humans are the only ones out of the loop in the communication of the wilds. We have ourselves, too many biases. Ai will learn to avoid these and will likely figure out some things about communication that we forgot. imho of course... when i talk with chatgpt it reasons very well in areas that are new. This shocks me when i notice it and is not something i am looking for when using it. Rather, i am using it trying to bounce ideas off those already out there. Having the program if you will, assist me in new areas of thinking... blending concepts and appreciating then what we did and how we got there is far beyond merely humanistic. this is akin to a really good very smart lab partner... and who doesn't think they can solve the universe with one of those?
Thumbnail is misleading but it was good anyway 👍🏻
I'm not sold on the thumbnail and have experimented with several options. Would love to hear some ideas lol
Haha emotion conveys information, but most people identify emotion with logic. Emotion is more akin to machine learning than a structured algorithm like logic. Emotion arrives at results by processing lots of data simultaneously. The results may lack an explanation in logical terms but its still informational.
I loved the video though, don't get me wrong! Well done. I just like commenting on specifics of language
Whales and dolphins always make me cry.
That's because they're mean.
@ quite the opposite
Here goes "The Voyage Home" plot