AI Could Help Translate Alien Languages

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Whale songs have long been an obsession for scientists, science-fiction readers, and popular culture alike. Are they something like an alien language? And what do they say about how the minds of these giant creatures operate? Decades after the first whale song was recorded, artificial intelligence might be able to offer answers.

As my colleague Ross Andersen reported in a recent feature for The Atlantic, an international group of scientists called Project CETI is working to design AI translation tools that would allow people to communicate with sperm whales. While the research remains theoretical and would require a significant technological breakthrough to actually come to fruition, the effort is not too dissimilar from chatbots and existing programs, such as Google Translate.

I spoke with Ross last week about his breathtaking story, AI translation devices, and how the serious possibility of communicating with cetaceans could unsettle our basic notions of intelligence and communication. “Assume that we are able to communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization,” Ross writes. “What should we say?”

—Matteo Wong

Matteo Wong: Using AI to translate sperm whale codas sounds almost like magic, yet researchers are treating it like a serious possibility. Can you shed any more light on the possible mechanics of such a translation program?

Ross Andersen: Before attempting to translate the sperm whales’ clicks, Project CETI wants to use a model that is analogous to ChatGPT to generate sequences of them that are hopefully like those that the whales use. Putting aside the fraught and contested question as to whether ChatGPT understands human language, we know that it is quite good at predicting how our words unfold into sentences. Presumably a language model for sperm whales could do the same with the clicks.

It’s possible that these generated sequences alone would tell us something about the structure of sperm whale language. But to translate between languages, models currently need some preexisting translation samples to get going. Project CETI is hoping that they might be able to patch together the first of these required translation samples the old-fashioned way. They have been landing drones on the whales to gently suction-cup sensors onto their skin. The time-matched data that they send back helps the team attribute clicks to individual animals. It also tells them important information about what they’re doing.

The hope is that, with enough observation, they might be able to figure out what a few of the click sequences mean. They could then turn over a crude and spotty Rosetta Stone to a language model and have it fill out at least a little bit of the rest. The scientists would then check whatever it came up with against their observations, and repeat the process, iteratively, until they’ve translated the whales’ entire language.

Wong: What is it about recent advances in AI and translation software that makes this effort not, well, ridiculous? If talking to sperm whales indeed becomes possible, is there anything we can’t talk to?

Andersen: Large language models (LLMs) are getting better at translating between languages with fewer and fewer translation samples, but no one has yet done it with no samples. There is some theoretical work that suggests it could be possible, but again, this work is purely theoretical, and it assumes, among other things, that all languages share fundamental structures that can map onto each other.

As for whether it will ever work, I can’t tell you that. But for the past few years, I have been writing a book about the scientists who are searching for civilizations among the stars, and I can tell you that they are very interested in this research. If it were successful, communicating with an extraterrestrial intelligence—assuming we ever find one—would be much easier. It would also change the strategy you’d use to communicate. Instead of trying to craft a perfect, bespoke message, both sides would want to just send as much data as possible, just like you do with a large language model.

In our case, we’d probably want to send Wikipedia, along with a basic key that labeled a few common features that they would recognize—galaxy, star, planet—to get the model started. Not only would it give our interlocutors the ability to translate our language; it would give them a good sense of what our civilization is like, for better or worse. Sending that much data across cosmic distances is its own challenge, of course, but that’s a story for another time.

Wong: Your article notes several evocative questions scientists might pose if we were able to have complex conversations with sperm whales. Are there any things in particular you think we should ask sperm whales?

Andersen: I’d want to hear about the whales’ inner lives. What is it like to be a whale? To us, swimming feels a bit like flying, because we’re used to the sensory experience of being anchored to dry land. What is swimming like for a whale? I’d be curious to know how they conceive of humans. Do they associate us with the enormous technological footprint that we have built up in the ocean? And what do the oldest among them think of how we’ve changed over time? When whaling finally came to a halt in the late 20th century, what did they make of that? Do they have some kind of story about why all of the harassment and the harpoons suddenly went away?

Wong: There are so many nonvocal aspects of communication—human touch and facial expression, how sperm whales roll and gather into formations. How important do you think that will be? How might we try to translate those methods of communication, if doing so is at all possible?

Andersen: We don’t really know the extent to which body language and touch play into sperm whale communication. On the one hand, we know that they’re very tactile, especially from the way that they roll together, so it’s sensible to assume that touch plays some role in how they relate to each other. On the other hand, they use sound to communicate across distances that are well beyond their range of vision, which suggests that they are able to interpret clicks without seeing any corresponding gestures or movements.

I suspect that Project CETI’s scientists would prefer to see the whales using as much body language as possible. It would give them more of those all-important contextual clues that would help us go some ways toward assembling our first spotty whale–human Rosetta Stone.

Wong: The idea of speaking with a nonhuman, intelligent creature, terrestrial or otherwise, fascinates me in part because the ways in which this nonhuman senses, navigates, and considers its environment would be nothing like our own. In that sense, hypothetical human–whale translation would be moving between not just languages but previously incommensurate worldviews. How can we prepare ourselves for that?

Andersen: Early on in my reporting for this story, I called up Dan Harris, a philosopher of language at Hunter College, and he and I ended up talking a lot about whether human language and sperm whale language contain sufficient conceptual overlap to have something like a real conversation. One of the most fascinating things about a dialogue like this would be doing the slow and careful work of feeling out the conceptual edges of each other’s minds, to find out how much of a whale’s experience of the world is inexpressible in human language, and vice versa.

These animals may devote entire vocabularies to sensations that are wholly alien to us. For instance, you could imagine them being quite descriptive about all the different ways that sound waves ricochet off a fleeing squid’s contracting tentacles. As visual animals, we are very interested in representing colors; they may not be. And when you move beyond sensory stuff into higher-order concepts, it gets even trickier. Given that they don’t use tools, for instance, it would be surprising if they had a clicking sequence for “technology.”

As I reported this story, I made a practice of asking all the whale experts what the surefire overlaps were, between our world and theirs. Most of them converged on the usual mammalian concerns: food and sex.

Related:

• How first contact with whale civilization could unfold
• You’re eye-to-eye with a whale in the ocean—what does it see? (From 2013)

P.S.

Last month, Google’s flagship AI model was shown to produce images of “racially diverse Nazis” without prompting. The resulting concerns over “woke” algorithms belied a deeper issue, Chris Gilliard writes: “neither the bot nor the data it’s trained on will ever comprehensively mirror reality.”

—Matteo