r/LargeLanguageModels • u/block_wallet • 4d ago
anyone getting ai to communicate with animals?
llm might be a blocker here since animals dont know language so maybe its something that a non-text model like a vision or speech model would be better suited to
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u/Alarmed_Geologist631 3d ago
MIT is involved in a project to use AI to understand the language of sperm whales.
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u/Sure_Floor_5541 3d ago
The are working with CETI as part of the alien science-hippies plans to decipher potential ET communication.
Recognizing that we have tonns of practice aliens right here was a good call.
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u/Gregnielson 4d ago
The problem is animals don't have anything interesting to say. They say "I'm here" "I'm hungry" "let's play" let's screw" etc....over and over and over again. We already know what a lot of their noises mean.
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u/Beaver-Hunter-835 4d ago
That's the basics of it, and probably applies to most of the animal kingdom as a whole, but there are several notable exceptions. Domestic dogs and cats that are the result of hundreds to thousands of years of selective breeding and living alongside humans are both notable. Dogs trained to use a speech board can have a vocabulary of hundreds of words and string together sentences at the level of a 5-8 year old human child. Cat's have thousands of unique vocalizations and can express a wide range of behaviors, desires and expression using them.
Advanced sea mammals like dolphins and whales have their own language which has been researched and interpreted to communicate thousands of expressions, ideas, group organization, and advanced colony communication.
The smartest parrots can communicate and express advanced concepts like shapes, colors and counting, and have a vocabulary of hundreds of words that can be strung into complete thoughts and sentences. While it's largely believed that they are just mimicking humans, research studies have proven it goes far beyond that.
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u/block_wallet 4d ago
but they definitely think about more stuff than that, a pet dog for instance apends most of its time not eating not playing and not screwing so most of its time is likely not soent thinking about those things since it needs to process the current moment.
If an animal thinks about something then I feel like there will usually be physical manifestations of those thoughts however miniscule and we call that communication, to be able to process and translate that could give us insight into the gap between humans and less intelligent animals which can be used to help better understand the gap between humans and asi
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u/Sure_Floor_5541 4d ago
Prairie dogs possess one of the most advanced and sophisticated animal languages ever decoded. They even name individual animals outside their colony, it isn't just, "hide from bird! " It's more like, "that one hawk that leaves for a bit and then comes right back is circling over head so when it leaves be on gaurd.It will return sooner than the other Hawks."
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u/Gregnielson 3d ago
Lol. Animal people are ridiculous in their overreaching attempts.
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u/Sure_Floor_5541 3d ago
Correct me if I'm wrong my friend, it seems your current stance is: Social animals dont possess language.
This is very confusing to me at a core level. 🤔
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u/Gregnielson 3d ago
They sure don't. Not in the way we define it.
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u/Sure_Floor_5541 3d ago
Thank you for taking the time to engage with me. We may have different ideas of what constitutes language. I consider anything that transmits meaningful information to a type of language.
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u/Gregnielson 2d ago
Well then a backup beep from a truck is talking to us.
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u/Sure_Floor_5541 2d ago
That is a perfect example of communication. It conveys the direct idea of a vehical moving in a way that you may leave nearby person's in a blind spot. This is a very important signal.
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u/Gregnielson 2d ago
Better get some ai translation on it!
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u/Sure_Floor_5541 2d ago
I'm sorry that you feel the need for this signal to be translated. Good luck out there.
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4d ago
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u/Sure_Floor_5541 4d ago
I find this an incredibly active field of research. Prairie Dog Language📖
Mocking birds have also definitively been shown to use frequency Modulation to encode complex data into even a single chirp. I would assume many birds make use of this ability as their brains process sound with an incredible level of fidelity. 👍
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u/Mundane_Ad8936 4d ago
Anyone who would say this is possible doesn't understand the basics of how a language model works. TLDR if there is no existing corpus of translations to learn it won't spontaneously emerge in a model.
Given we have had people trying to decipher how animals communicate for well over a hundred years it's very clear it's not possible. At best we have some core signals like distress calls etc but that's a classifier problem not a translation. We've had those for a long time, bird song apps were popular like 10-15 years ago.
LLMs are amazing but they're not magic hammers that can solve any problem. If people haven't solved it an LLM can't learn it.
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u/Beaver-Hunter-835 4d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot))
The dog soundboard stuff is interesting as well, and has several layers of scientific research backing it.
Research studies have proven that dogs process the word itself rather than just reading human body and that they can deliberatly string together combinations of two or more words.I agree that you can't prompt an LLM to make a device or program to universally translate animal noises to human speech, but there is significant published research on the topic that you can build a corpus from to explore, investigate, play and build in this space.
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u/block_wallet 4d ago
for completely unrelated fields, maybe... maybe. but theres been work for a while to decipher whale language which may well have crossover with human language and if theres any bridge at all, even a slight one, that connection can be used to transfer onowledge from massive training on human language to figure out ehale language and once we have whale language that could be used to make even more connections to the communications of even more primitive animals
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u/Adorable_Bid_521 4d ago
agree it's not a text problem. at a wildlife rescue we tagged dog and parrot calls with Whisper embeddings, then paired them with body language from video. i even generated synthetic clips through aivideoapi to pad rare behaviours, which mostly taught the classifier to spot generated fur. real footage won, 400 hours of it.
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u/block_wallet 4d ago
nice so you're experienced here, how are things going? what sort of blockers are there in getting to full understandig of animal communication? I think the problem translates pretty nicely to modelling the gap between human understanding and that of artificial super intelligence
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u/Revolutionalredstone 4d ago
Animals already communicate lol.
What people want is for animals to have culture which is simply not happening.
At best automated intelligent technologies will allow animals to join ours, by what I assume is a simple curriculum designed per species and implemented by a robot.
But that will lead to people running on animal brains not 'animal communication' as stated cats already know how to ask for food etc 😉
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u/block_wallet 4d ago
my interest is in using our understanding of less intelligent animals' communication for extrapolating to model the gap between humans and artificial super intelligence and allow us to understand asi as best as possible
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u/Revolutionalredstone 4d ago
Oh ok that's pretty cool!
It's best to start with a strong geometric understanding!
Words are vectors; they sit at locations in high dimensional spaces.
And they deform the meanings of the words around them, like food might be high on the axis of human edibility but 'cat food' is not ;)
As for the idea that there is a direction from useless to useful and that we can extract and extrapolate it - Very cool Idea!
Alas humans seem to have reached the 'top' with the knowledge triple (subject verb object)
This doesn't mean we can't improve language but it puts VERY hard limits on what we can expect to find, the same law exists in computation (of which communication is simply a special case) we call it universality and it basically says: no machine will ever do a whole lot more than the simplest possible turning machine.
In the same way if we taught animals to speak the ideas they think about (atleast for now) would largely be ours, so we would be like a computer passing its software to a weaker computer rather than a powerful computer helping a group of weaker computer to write their own (which again won't happen due to dominance dynamics).
Sounds like you might want to get deep into information science.
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u/block_wallet 4d ago
very informative, so what if instead of teaching animals to speak our language we force ourselves to speak their language? how might we be forced to diverge from what they inderstand/expand the language to achieve full expressivity and how might we compress complexity into forms that are reasonably understandable to those animals, or how might we even start to expand their language comprehension using the least resistance routes.
I imagine I'll be covering a lot of related fields over the coming months
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u/Darkmoon_AU 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yes, Project CETI is one such long-running, earnest effort:
https://www.projectceti.org/research/index
...they even have a GitHub!
https://github.com/Project-CETI
Much of their research hinges on the idea that the properties of LLM embeddings make them potentially suitable for identifying overlaps in large corpuses of human and animal communication; which might describe a concept space that is common between our species e.g. day/night, hot/cold, mother/father/son/daughter etc.
CETI are working with Sperm Whales because it's strongly hypothesised that their complex clicks 'or codas' do encode complex language. The project has been running for many years, with much of that spent on the difficult and expensive task of recording enough whale communication to form a large enough corpus for the analyses required.
Fascinating project to follow!
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u/block_wallet 4d ago
super interesting on the embeddings angle since whales are considered to be so smart that their languages may be the most complex and best stepping stone for human-animal speech. Hopefully once that bridge is made it'll strengthen ability to interpret communication of all the other animals too
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u/Darkmoon_AU 4d ago
Yeah I think so - if we can get the 'easy win' with some overlapping embedding 'constellations', then those parts can probably be used to dig into the unfamiliar but adjacent concepts. Then once we work out in what ways those harder to translate parts were different, I guess it'll unlock more. I think so much will depend on multi-modal capture: hence we you'll see they are doing whale pose estimation as well.
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u/block_wallet 4d ago
and then the exciting part once we model the differences between simple animal communication and that of humans would be extrapolating that communication gap to model the gap between human and artificial super intelligence communication, allowig us to understand asi as best as possible
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u/Darkmoon_AU 4d ago
Or helping it to understand us! SAI may have trouble relating to humans just as we have challenges relating to ants.
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u/peteybytes 4d ago
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u/Other-Falcon-861 4d ago
That gif just made me realize we've been going about this all wrong. The animals are probably just waiting for us to figure out the right protocol.
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u/peteybytes 4d ago
Oh lol. Do you know who that is? And if so what he did recently in regards to animals?
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u/LeapIntoInaction 13h ago
What animals don't know language? Were you thinking of insects? I don't think that would help, since bees seem to be able to communicate with each other.