Sperm whales and language

I’m fascinated by the idea that whales are an advanced civilization right in front of us that we have haven’t given much thought to communicating with. Our idea of aliens has been shaped by Star Trek, and we think that we’ll happen upon some green creatures that conveniently speak fluent English.

There’s increasing hope that we’ll be able to understand whale speech, and this short podcast with one of the professors leading the effort is worth a listen if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Sperm whale vocalizations are like clicks rather than the more familiar whale sounds that have become favorite ambient noise tracks. It’s not exactly soothing background music, but interesting to listen to this clip.

Going back to my reading of Jarod Lanier, I think he’d caution against the whole hyped up title of the podcast that boldly claims we’re using AI to communicate with whales. To quote from his piece There is no A.I.:

A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures. In both cases, it’s people who have written the text and furnished the images. The new programs mash up work done by human minds. What’s innovative is that the mashup process has become guided and constrained, so that the results are usable and often striking. This is a significant achievement and worth celebrating—but it can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between human creations, rather than as the invention of a new mind.

This is no way undermines the technological achievements behind an LLM. It’s changing the accent. Instead of a futuristic machine magically solving problems, the work of thousands of humans is being compared by a fancy calculator to make guesses how other humans and possibly non-humans communicate.