“Act now, rather than wait until it’s too late” → well put.
Glad to see the good work of CaML and others highlighted. Positively influencing the models as much as possible right now seems vital.
A random one—is AI for inter-species communication emerging as a thing? Is it viable in the short term, are there promising projects working on it with a view to bringing it to the masses via mobile apps etc?
Hi Simon! You can find out more about the latest development at Earth Species Project here and Project CETI here. There have been some recent breakthroughs with detecting and classifying animal bioacoustic signals through LLM-type models.
Thanks Simon! Yes, AI for inter-species communication is underway. The main organisations working on this at the moment are Earth Species Project (who just received a $17 million grant) and Project CETI. So far as I can tell, work is still in its early stages and mainly focussed on gathering and cleaning audiovisual data and getting a better sense for different species’ portfolio of sounds, rather than actual communication.
I’m still unsure how good this will be for animals. I wrote a brief post on this for the AI for Animals newsletter if you’re interested, but the upshot is that I can see plenty of ways for this technology to be abused (e.g. used for hunting, fishing, exploitation of companion animals for entertainment purposes, co-option by the factory farming industry, etc.). I also think there’s a risk that we only use it for communication with a handful of popular species (e.g. dogs, cats, whales, dolphins), and don’t consider what this means for other less popular species (like farmed chickens).
The most promising project I’ve seen so far is the partnership between Project CETI and the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Project at New York University, which is focussed on the ethical implications of interspecies communication. I hope that these kinds of guidelines will end up driving progress on this rather than corporate interests… and that we focus on using AI to understand animals better on their own terms, rather than trying to communicate with them purely for our own curiosity and entertainment.
“Act now, rather than wait until it’s too late” → well put.
Glad to see the good work of CaML and others highlighted. Positively influencing the models as much as possible right now seems vital.
A random one—is AI for inter-species communication emerging as a thing? Is it viable in the short term, are there promising projects working on it with a view to bringing it to the masses via mobile apps etc?
Hi Simon! You can find out more about the latest development at Earth Species Project here and Project CETI here. There have been some recent breakthroughs with detecting and classifying animal bioacoustic signals through LLM-type models.
Thanks Simon! Yes, AI for inter-species communication is underway. The main organisations working on this at the moment are Earth Species Project (who just received a $17 million grant) and Project CETI. So far as I can tell, work is still in its early stages and mainly focussed on gathering and cleaning audiovisual data and getting a better sense for different species’ portfolio of sounds, rather than actual communication.
I’m still unsure how good this will be for animals. I wrote a brief post on this for the AI for Animals newsletter if you’re interested, but the upshot is that I can see plenty of ways for this technology to be abused (e.g. used for hunting, fishing, exploitation of companion animals for entertainment purposes, co-option by the factory farming industry, etc.). I also think there’s a risk that we only use it for communication with a handful of popular species (e.g. dogs, cats, whales, dolphins), and don’t consider what this means for other less popular species (like farmed chickens).
The most promising project I’ve seen so far is the partnership between Project CETI and the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Project at New York University, which is focussed on the ethical implications of interspecies communication. I hope that these kinds of guidelines will end up driving progress on this rather than corporate interests… and that we focus on using AI to understand animals better on their own terms, rather than trying to communicate with them purely for our own curiosity and entertainment.