If we can talk with dolphins, we might not like what they have to say to us. Photo: Unsplash
A new AI model called DolphinGemma is getting us a little closer to possibly figuring out just what dolphins are chattering about.
It seems fairly clear that certain animals communicate with each other, but they don’t do it in the same sense as our understanding of language, unless you’re counting those animals that understand certain human phrases like “sit” and “stay” and “shake.” To anyone watching, though, many animals definitely have a way of transmitting things to each other. Of all of them, dolphins, with their rapid clicks and whistles, might be the most obvious. And given the fact that they’re so good at interacting with us, we’re a little more interested in learning more about how they communicate than we are in something like the poor old blobfish.
DolphinGemma, the artificial intelligence system, was developed by Google along with researchers from Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP). The Wild Dolphin Project has been collecting enormous amounts of data on dolphin sounds, and within them, researchers have been noticing certain patterns. We know that mothers have whistles that call their calves. We know that rapid clicks and buzzing sounds are used in mating, and we know that other sounds, described often as squawks, are used when dolphins are fighting each other. We haven’t yet deciphered exactly what those sounds all actually mean, however, but DolphinGemma makes identifying those patterns a little easier.
According to IFLScience, the program takes all that data and inputs it into a language model that’s already being used to find patterns in complicated sequences. It’s similar to what ChatGPT does for our languages — it doesn’t exactly know how to “speak,” but it is getting better and better at taking combinations of sounds, finding patterns, and using context from previous sound combinations and patterns to respond in an appropriate way. Researchers can then take that information and learn how it might be structured into something that resembles our definition of a language.
We’re still a long way off from actually having a chat with a dolphin, but the Wild Dolphin Project has been working on it for a long time now. It’s a tough thing, though, because, like humans, dolphins appear to have different languages depending on their region. Whether that’s simply something like an accent or a whole different speech pattern has yet to be discovered, but with DolphinGemma, we’re one step closer.
