London, United Kingdom (Enmaeya News) — Scientists are using artificial intelligence to study the way dolphins and other animals communicate, a breakthrough that could eventually change how people understand and interact with nature.
Google DeepMind, one of the world’s leading AI labs, is developing a project called DolphinGemma, described as a large language model trained on dolphin sounds. The technology is designed to help scientists break down, analyze and possibly respond to dolphin communication in ways that weren’t possible before.
"I like to think that we will be able to talk to animals at some point," said Drew Purves, nature lead at DeepMind, during a recent episode of the company’s podcast.
DolphinGemma is being developed in partnership with researchers from Georgia Tech and supported by fieldwork from the Wild Dolphin Project. It works by listening to dolphin audio, separating out the different parts of their sounds, and turning those sounds into data that an AI system can understand — similar to how large language models like ChatGPT work with human text.
"It takes the sounds, separates them out, tokenizes them, and basically brings it into the world of large language modeling," Purves said. "That's an example of AI actively being used to study animal communication at a level we really couldn't do before."
Purves added that while this research currently helps fill existing gaps in knowledge, the real value may come from how it changes human perception of the natural world. "Sometimes, the real change can come from these moments of awakening, where people suddenly shift their relationship with nature," he said.
But DeepMind isn’t the only group working on decoding animal language with AI.
The Earth Species Project, a nonprofit organization launched in 2017, is also focused on using artificial intelligence to understand how non-human species communicate. The group recently unveiled NatureLM-audio, which it says is the world’s first large audio-language model trained specifically on animal sounds.
According to the organization, the model can help scientists identify and classify species by sound alone — and may even help recognize new species that haven't been formally discovered.
One of the project’s key discoveries so far is that several animal species — including elephants, gray parrots and marmosets — appear to have names for one another, said Katie Zacarian, the project’s CEO, during the 2023 Axios AI+ Summit.
Zacarian said the Earth Species Project hopes its technology will help humans reconnect with the rest of the living world — not to exploit nature further, but to support a more respectful, sustainable relationship with it.
"We’re not doing this to extract or control," she said. "We want to help all species thrive, not just make current problems worse."
Aza Raskin, cofounder and president of the Earth Species Project, compared this work to other turning points in science that changed how people see themselves in the universe.
"These tools are going to change the way that we see ourselves in relation to everything," Raskin told Scientific American.
