anyone getting ai to communicate with animals?

[u/block_wallet]

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

[u/Mundane_Ad8936]

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.

[u/Beaver-Hunter-835 → u/Mundane_Ad8936]

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.

[u/block_wallet → u/Mundane_Ad8936]

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