Listening to the Talking Planet

Off the coast of Dominica, the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) is feeding thousands of sperm whale codas into the same kind of large language models (LLMs) that power human chatbots.

LLMs have been trained on human writing, code, and art. Using them to decode the language of another species is an untested bet: cetacean and human expression may share enough structure for the same architecture to work.

The muted planet

Indigenous traditions, from the Amazonian idea of perspectivism to the Māori principle of ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au (“I am the river and the river is me”), have long treated humans and non-humans as members of a shared moral community. As botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer observed, “science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.”

Once Descartes declared animals to be biological automata (bêtes-machines), a dominant portion of humanity ushered in a profound cosmic isolation. The silence was also an economic necessity: industrial agriculture, deep-sea trawling, and unchecked deforestation are only palatable if their targets have no admissible voice. CETI and similar initiatives around the globe are trying to reverse that erasure by building the tools to listen to what those traditions never stopped hearing.

Subtitles for nature

Machine learning research shows that LLMs struggle to translate meaning even between typologically distant human languages. Meaning, as enactivist philosophers have argued, is perhaps bound to physical embodiment. The cognitive reality of an echolocating creature cannot be mapped cleanly onto the syntax of a bipedal primate.

But AI can detect patterns that constitute evidence of harm. When a model maps the communication patterns of a whale pod and correlates those acoustic signatures with stress hormones and behavioural disruption, it becomes evidence that a shipping lane is fracturing social structures. We do not need to know what a cetacean click means to know what is harming it.

Violations against nature are beginning to be taken more seriously. The Rights of Nature movement has secured legal personhood for the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Mar Menor lagoon in Spain. While these are best viewed as regulatory experiments, geospatial data are being used as evidence in courtrooms around the world. In Argentina, satellite imagery helped convict a rancher of ecocide after he destroyed a penguin nesting ground and killed more than a hundred penguins. Satellite images and GIS maps have also been accepted as evidence of environmental crimes in India’s National Green Tribunal, though the use of geospatial data is not yet governed to the point where it can routinely be relied upon.

Until now, nature has depended on human proxies to guess at her needs. With AI we can automate listening to nature, because no human team can monitor continuously at the scale required: Curupiras detect chainsaws and tractors in the Amazon, TrailGuard identifies poachers near endangered tigers, and OrcaHello listens for orca calls so that marine construction pauses and ships go around the pod.

The terrarium

The same instrument that recognizes the alterity of the non-human world can be turned to optimize the biosphere as a managed terrarium. In Guinea, a mining company estimated its expansion would kill eighty-three chimpanzees and created a national park elsewhere to offset the loss. Independent researchers later estimated the true toll to be up to four hundred. A hydroelectric dam was subsequently planned that would flood part of the biodiversity offset. The offset enabled what it was designed to prevent, and still it worked exactly as intended: the chimps had been counted and discounted. We are listening to the numbers, not to nature.

The rehearsal

Dreams of contact with alien intelligence presume we can comprehend it. Such an alien intelligence will not share our biological embodiment or our evolutionary history. If we cannot decipher the alien leviathans of Earth, species with whom we share DNA and a planetary home, first contact with a truly extraterrestrial mind is hubris. The non-human intelligence of Earth is therefore the rehearsal. We silenced the planet to consume it in peace, but the cetaceans are clicking off Dominica and the neural net is listening on our behalf.