Could Chat GPT Talk to Whales?

this is the sound of the biggest toothed predator on the planet a song being broadcast from the deepest reaches of the sea a call that sounds less like a harmonious Melody like we hear from other whales but more like a digital data transfer it's the sound that haunted Sailors for centuries a sound which they thought to be the cries of the ghosts of drowned Sailors calling out to them amazingly it wasn't until 1957 that scientists even realized that these sounds were in fact coming from whales and it wasn't until the 1970s that they realized that these undulating clicking bellowing noises were a form of communication and now researchers think sperm whales could be our best chance at breaking a barrier we've never broken that they might hold the key to unlocking the first ever case of inter-species communication because if you were to bet on one animal that had something that was even close to human language it would be the sperm whale over the years scientists have learned that their brains are extremely developed that they have Rich social and family lives culture and an intricate communication system to support it all their lives in many ways are similar to ours and their language could have developed for similar reasons plus they've had their massive brains for tens of millions of years longer than we've had our current sized brains and with a vast repertoire of different sounds with intricate patterns it seems as though sperm whale language could be as complex as our own speaking with other animals has long been a part of the collective human imagination part of folklore fables and fantasy and many different cultures but now for the first time we have technology that might be able to actually break the code recently we've all seen the huge strides in the field of natural language processing with chat gpt3 giving a clear idea of what is possible when it comes to computers in human language as technology like this has advanced dramatically over the last 10 years scientists now think they can apply these techniques to the field of inter-species communication specifically to sperm whales because sperm whales and other species aren't just singing to one another they seem to be communicating specific messages maybe even using language in a way that we could understand for thousands of years humans have considered language to be one of the defining characteristics of our species and something that other animals couldn't possibly approximate so we hardly bothered to investigate all the ways that animals actually are communicating today with better technology we're starting to realize that many species have complex forms of conveying information prairie dogs have distinctive alarm calls for different predators and have even used different calls to distinguish the size shape color and speed of those Predators male and female putty-nosed monkeys each produce their own alarm calls when leopards approach the female is calling to get males to go on the defense and the males calling to Signal they're ready for a fight bat squeaks aren't just echolocation to help them hunt they sometimes contain information about the speaker and which other bat is being addressed even tiny jumping spiders have a form of communication through vibrations the animal kingdom is clearly full of species communicating to one another but whether or not they're using language is much harder to recognize when Linguistics developed as an area of studies specifically interested in analyzing the differences between human language and the mechanics of how language works and is acquired it seemed clear that nothing else on Earth was communicating the way we are human language has grammar the overarching structure of each language and syntax which is the order in which words are spoken in order to convey meaning we have the ability to create new words and use them to communicate information about things that happened elsewhere or in the past or future human languages are complex and nuanced what we don't know is if the same is true of any other animal but there's one species that might be able to help us solve that problem as we've learned more and more about sperm whales they seem to be the perfect candidate to put our non-human translation abilities to the test sperm whales make the loudest noises of any living creature up to 230 decibels for reference when sounds are made above the water human eardrums rupture when noises are louder than 150 decibels sperm whale communities also use discrete sequences of clicks that get repeated in specific patterns called codas researchers believe this is the basic communication unit for their language and codas differ between whales in different regions for the whales off the coast of Dominica a typical Coda has five clicks and lasts for around 4 seconds they have recognizable patterns measured by inter-click intervals codas are mostly produced during periods of socialization not when the whales are hunting or engaged in other activities and calves can take up to two years to produce recognizable codas and before that they Babble just like human babies all of these elements seem like the ingredients to a language that we might be able to make sense of thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence but how exactly can computers help us with this never before solved puzzle thanks to seti we may be about to find out the world's largest ever interspecies communication effort was launched in March 2020 with a project known as the citation translation initiative or seti if that sounds familiar it might be because there's another moonshot project known as seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the case of this new citation project scientists will be collecting data from a group of sperm whales around the Caribbean island of Dominica the whales of that area have already been studied for more than 15 years thanks to the Dominica sperm whale project but before we can understand how computers might translate whale language let's first dive into how they've done so for human languages since 2014 Machine translation has largely relied on something called an encoder decoder deep learning model which is a system that uses two separate neural networks the encoder is the first neural network and is where you input a sentence in say English the encoder takes each word in the sentence and turns these into a sequence of numbers which are multi-dimensional vector representations for each word which are called word embeddings the second neural network decoder will take this sequence of numbers and output a sentence in a different language but for this to work it needs human supervision it relies on known pairs of inputs and outputs a system like this wouldn't work to translate any language that's new or unknown and for several years this was the best machine learning could do that is until 2018 a group at Facebook research found it's possible to do completely unsupervised translation you do this by taking all the words from one language and calculating their statistical properties more or less how often that word is used and with what other words it's often correlated you can then assign all the words to a point Cloud kind of like a 3D Galaxy based on these statistical properties then if you do the same for a totally different language and compare the point clouds they have nearly identical structures a word located in a particular position in the galaxy in one language would be in the same location in any other language you can take languages as dissimilar as English and Chinese and the structure in the point clouds will still line up and this means you can translate languages without needing a Rosetta Stone Tom muscle a documentary filmmaker and the author of how to speak whale has followed the work of researchers at seti for years he is particularly thrilled about how this development could apply to sperm whales that's what all the scientists excited because they thought if we can then get a big enough core person a big enough amount of uh recordings and that gives you a weigh-in with no bilingual dictionaries which is what the situation we have with other species and it doesn't mean that we're going to make a cloud in sperm whale and that it's going to match the human one but maybe there'll be some shapes that do maybe some parts of the universe that they represent in their communication does match ours but those differences and similarities are going to give us an idea of what the different language galaxies that exist in in life are the AI will be trained not just to predict what a single whale might say next but we'll also learn to predict what a second whale might say like in a conversation the result will be like a whale chat bot but there's one caveat to all of this for it to work you need a ton of data like so much data for reference chat gpt3 needed to be trained with over 500 billion words to be able to do what it does this is the largest neural network that's ever been trained maybe we don't need chat GPT 3 levels of data but can we even get close to enough data from sperm whales for translation to be possible in order to estimate how much data sperm whale communication the seti project might be able to gather we can do a simple back of the envelope calculation scientists are studying a 20 square kilometer area off the coast of Dominica where 50 to 400 whales are observed depending on the season sperm whales vocalize almost constantly however 75 of the clicks are used for echolocation the remaining 25 percent of the clicks are used for communication the coda clicks a typical Coda from the whales in this region is about one click per second so dividing the number of seconds in a year by four times the number of whales gives us 400 million to 4 billion clicks a year approximately so not nearly close to chat gpt3 levels but still enough to work with at the high end it's between Google's Birch algorithm and chat gbt2 levels but how exactly will researchers collect this data it's a task that will require a host of autonomous and semi-autonomous devices that continuously record the whales from above below and all around them one source of data will be from tethered buoy arrays these devices will collect massive amounts of background whale bioacoustic data these are Big devices and work in a similar way to military equipment that detects submarines over large areas and distances each array will consist of audio recording devices that will be positioned at different depths in 200 to 300 meter increments up to 1200 meters which is the depth that sperm whales are known to hunt and attaching certain codas to certain depths could be a particularly good place to start looking for patterns in their language a study done in 2016 reported that sperm whales seem to use certain codas at certain depths some were used on the ascent from a dive some on The Descent and some at the surface immediately after returning with many hydrophone arrays in the water scientists will also be able to track the movements of specific whales over space and time in addition to the static hydrophones scientists are attaching recording devices to the whales themselves using suction cups these tags provide the most detailed recordings of the sounds that they make and also record signals from inertial and pressure sensors which will allow scientists to reconstruct the whale's motion into diving patterns the tags are especially critical and uniquely identifying whales and conversations and associating the behavioral patterns with the recordings and at last are the autonomous sound recording Robots free swimming and passively floating aquatic drones will record audio and video from multiple animals simultaneously to observe behaviors and conversations within a group of whales this will hopefully cover any blind spots from the first two methods all of this data will be combined into a complex array of data which can then be parsed out by different algorithms so what they're really doing is they're working with a whole different Suite of machine learning tools some of them will be looking through all the audio and their job will be to figure out when a sperm whale is making a sound or not is that the sound of a landslide is that the sound of a sperm whale then they'll have to filter out is the sperm whale echolocating or is it a sperm while making a communication vocalization like a coder and then they'll have to separate them out then they'll have to figure out who's talking and where were they talking and what else was going on because that sort of metadata you know was it the one that then fought with the other one was it the one that was hunting was it the one that was nursing it's young and what relationship does it have to the other sperm whales who were involved in that vocalization exchange who could have heard it what was the sea doing then they'll try and figure out okay well how different it is to the kind of things that have been said before and how many different kinds of sounds do they make and that's when you start to sort of have hypotheses about meaning what do you think they might be communicating about researchers have already collected around a hundred thousand sperm whale codas and tied each call to specific whales an algorithm was created to analyze these codas and categorize them by which whale made which call and it was accurate more than 94 of the time but this experiment will not be without its challenges there are so many variables in any given Coda that it will be extremely difficult to parse what is Meaningful and what is not for example many of the clicks have almost the same structure but with slight variations like codas with a different amplitude or a different frequency are these variations akin to differences in pronunciation or are these fundamental variations that have different meanings and does the unsupervised machine learning translation model rely on something innately human for it to work we might use the words in a sentence to describe how we're feeling for example I feel happy today but to translate this into whale assumes they have the same sense of self that we do that they have similar emotions as we do that they perceive time in the same way we do there are some words that are more likely to be common between us words like mother baby Friend or Foe but just as a whale might not understand the concept behind a word like today what might a whale have a word for that we can't even conceptualize so even if the seti researchers are able to collect all of this information about sperm whales it's impossible to say whether they'll be able to translate the codas in a way that would make sense to us as language but even if we can't directly translate everything that they're saying researchers hope that there will still be some patterns we can recognize some fragments of language that can tell us more about their lives their families or even their intentions or problems because the attempt to understand whales whether successful or not might also be a way for us to care for and help them a thing that's really struck me through my whole career was the more that you can relate to other species the more you care about them all ocean ecosystems are under threat from climate change and cetaceans are among those groups the Marine Heat Wave known as The Blob that formed over the Pacific Ocean from 2014 to 2016 resulted in crashing fish and whale populations even without extreme heat waves the oceans are still getting warmer which means cold water species like the white beaked dolphin are having to find new habitats the availability of food is changing and runoff from the shoreline could eventually lead to cetaceans being poisoned by different chemicals and on top of this the shipping industry has regular impacts on cetacean populations shipping lanes that overlap with important whale habitats can lead to whales being struck and the noise of vessels can disrupt hunting and vocalizations whales and dolphins are facing a difficult future in large part due to human activity language is after all the tool that propelled humans to innovate and solve so many of the problems that once Afflicted us it's an evolutionary advantage that likely allowed us to dominate The Globe and its origins in our species is one of the greatest mysteries of modern science did language suddenly develop in humans or did we earn our voices through the slow incremental process of natural selection that marks all other aspects of evolution did language only ever develop in our species Homo Sapien or did the other early humans use language too this is a hotly debated extremely exciting corner of science Linguistics and Archeology and to understand the great debate and hear the most compelling theories you should watch our brand new episode of becoming human on nebula how humans started speaking this is the fourth episode in our Flagship series about human evolution which takes you through the most important steps in our Evolution that made us the incredible strange Apes that we are today for this series we've created our own world in 3D to show you the artifacts fossils and archaeological digs all in one place like a magical Museum of all of the most incredible aspects of early human in archeology this is a series that wouldn't have really made sense to put here on YouTube it's a series we wanted to take our time with and a series that's more archaeological and more philosophical than what we normally do here but it's a subject so important to the innate desire we all have of trying to understand our own humanity and that's why we created this series for nebula nebula is a streaming platform that was created by us by the educational YouTube content creators who wanted to experiment play and just create more sometimes the content we want to make is experimental too long too short or contains themes that would get it demonetized instantly on YouTube sometimes we want to make content that doesn't exactly fit on our regular YouTube channels or sometimes like in the case of becoming human we wanted to make a beautiful Standalone piece signing up to nebula is also the single best thing you can do to support this channel by signing up you're directly supporting us getting to watch all of your favorite content ad free and also getting access to tons of exclusive content nebula is now also offering a nebula first content where you can get some of your favorite creators shows weeks or months before they're on YouTube like jet lag the game or episodes from Johnny Harris legal eagle and many more and on top of the original content and nebula First videos if you sign up with my link you get free access to nebula classes where creators host classes on how to make the content you know and love all of the classes are taught by the creators on nebula so you can learn how Alex the low spec gamer makes videos on a budget or how foreign tells stories or how Patrick Willems makes movies your favorite creators teaching you how they create if you've ever wanted to become a content creator video maker or are just curious how it all gets done this is a great place to start so if you sign up for nebula using the link below you can get nebula for a little over two dollars and fifty cents a month or 30 dollars for the entire year a portion of the subscription fee goes directly to us and the rest goes towards building this platform to become the best streaming platform out there for viewers and creators It's Quickly becoming the hub for online creators and now is the best time to join

Channel: Real Science

Views: 635,032

Keywords:

Id: hph9OeKjg3w

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/xamnelg]

It's interesting to consider that models such as GPT 4 and LaMDA are contextualized to human language and experience. I wonder if creating models based on other species will reveal new types of intelligence we have yet to understand.

On the flip side of that, many hypothesis' regarding the development of human intelligence suggest that it came about as a direct result of complex language. Would equipping a species like whales with similar abilities explode their intelligence beyond our own?

[u/ddirtydevil]

In my opinion this is the greatest scientific-technological endeavor since the Space Race.

[u/WonderFactory]

Imagine having an argument with your dog about why you haven't taken it for a walk all day.

[u/La_flame_rodriguez]

asking a bird the meaning of life. Dope sh*t

[u/Hydramole]

Would these data points be considered alien?