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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

As usual with these kinds of things the title doesn't match the article.

There is no breakthrough in understanding. Instead they identified a thing in the sound that changes.

They do not understand what it means, they just see it. It could be something, or nothing, or just music.

Perhaps, but the scientists involved went from "whale songs are like groans" to "whale songs are like talking". The 'breakthrough' they were describing is that visibility into a complex, and repeatable, substructure to the songs shows that those songs could contain more complex "words." If you have ever tried to communicate by groaning only (which an acquaintance of mine was forced to do while recovering in the ICU once) there are very limited things you can say, and it often reduces to you asking questions and them producing a "yes" groan, or a "no" groan. They can't 'tell' you a whole lot.

As a result of their research they are getting closer to the underlying structure (which others will look for in other species of whales) and with that they may be able create situations where they could start testing the concepts that might be in that structure. That sounds kind of breakthroughish to me :-)

Having read the article. I don't know where one would get the idea that it said anything meaningful about the songs being like "talking", which implies a whole host of features that were not even mentioned. They made analogies with human language phenomena such as suprasegmental features but really this was about there being newly discovered patterns in the sounds. These were not correlated to any specific meaning or purpose. We need those if one is going to talk about the whale song as a communicative system at all, much less a language. With reference to something like Hockett's design features, we have a modality, but despite the existence of a pattern, we don't even know if there is discreteness, necessarily. It is kind of like how children will be taught about atoms and think about the solar system. The analogy may be meaningful or not. The article relies on the readiness of the reader to anthropomorphize the noises made by the animals and misleads them.

This from the paper's abstract: Finally, we control for whale movement and present several pieces of evidence suggesting that the observed patterns are not artifacts, but are actively controlled by sperm whales. We also show that the two coda vowels (the a-vowel and i-vowel) are actively exchanged by sperm whales in dialogues. The uncovered spectral properties suggest that codas are highly compositional, more informative, and more complex than previously thought.

This from the article: “If our findings are correct, it means that the communication of sperm whales is much more complex and can carry more information than previously thought,” the researchers concluded.

The researchers here make two observations, the whales intentionally use specific forms in their songs and the specific forms are sequenced differently but intentionally. For biologists this is significant because it differs from a common form of "singing" or "calls" that each have a specific meaning but they are not internally variegated like these calls are. What the researchers propose (or hypothesize) is that this intentional and varied voicing within a "song" suggests the whales are exchanging much more detailed information than "threat" or "help" or "food here" etc.

Morse?

They identified a thing that changes, but in a consistent way across the sample population. That's a very important distinction, because synchronizing vocalizations is not easy. Humans spend a long time learning it. And failure to do it "correctly" can be everything from an accent to a speech pathology, depending on how "wrong" it is. (Scare quotes purely because the definition of right and wrong changes over space and time.)

Impertinent question: why not ask ChatGPT to talk with them? It doesn't have understanding either. I think this would be a great experiment in the meaning of consciousness. Can we train an LLM to communicate with whales, birds, etc.?

It’s being done right now:

https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/

One difficulty is that there isn’t nearly as much whale chatter available for training data as there’s human chatter.

And one important question is, why is this useful if we don’t know what the LLM says to them? But the post above touches on that too.

Won't they need some documents that combine whale speech noises with human words to bridge the gap? Otherwise they are making comments that are just word-like or sound-like fragments.

If you had enough recordings, you could (I think) build weights based _solely_ on whale speech. Humans wouldn't be able to understand the weights, and the word vectors in that model wouldn't match the word vectors in an English model, but I suppose there's a chance that vectors might be similar? I don't know. I think you'd have to be very good at both linguistics and also AI to know.

I don't think this is strictly needed. An English dictionary may seem pointless because it defines every word using only other English words. But the meaning is contained in the _relationship_ between the words.

I'm sure you've seen the example of word vectors that captures some of this meaning. king - man + woman = queen

In Spanish, rey - hombre + mujer = reina

The _relationship_ between "king" and "queen" in English may look close enough to the _relationship_ between "rey" and "reina" in Spanish, allowing you to bridge the gap between the two languages, even if they are entirely disconnected and you've never seen a direct translation between them.

>And one important question is, why is this useful if we don’t know what the LLM says to them?

There's no reason to be sure we couldn't know.

It's not like there are examples in the training set for every lang to lang combination modern models are capable of translating.

A llm can write a program to compute factorial or whatever, but that doesn't mean it has consciousness. Same for writing a poem about any topic. It is of course also not evidence of no consciousness. We just don't know but the likely-hood seems low.

For whales or even dogs or great apes, I think the chances are much higher, but we just don't know. We can't even agree on a definition for what consciousness is.

What does it matter if they’re conscious if they’re dumb?

Just because a consciousness exists staring out of a pair of eyes doesn’t change any ethics if that consciousness is exceptionally limited.

I thought about this for a few days. I eat meat, animal products like milk too. I feel some guilt about it, an animal died to get me this chicken sandwich. We'll face decisions about whether to continue ending the consciousness of animals to feed ourselves when we have alternatives. I'm far from the first person to think of this, but when we have some machine consciousness that compares to a chicken (I don't know how to measure consciousness but we'll face that one day), will there be a common understanding of what it means morally to be ending that consciousness?

I think one day we'll probably almost completely stop killing "intelligent" animals (in 100s of years after we develop safe and tasty alternatives). What about a software consciousness? I don't know. What about if we are able to "upload" our consciousness, will it have civil rights? Probably not at first.

In theory, we could train an LLM on whale "song" or bird chirps. We'd need to have lots and lots of it to feed it. But I don't think it would tell us what the animals are saying. The animals would theoretically recognize the output of the models and be able to interact with it but I don't think there is a clear path from that to our understanding.

The LLM accidentally declares war on all whales... :/

It would, best case, just be able to talk about concepts that whales and birds talk about, right? “Ahh, a predator” “I found food” “weird trickster-monkey spotted, expect bizarre tests or treats or mysterious death.”

I’m not sure what a ML algorithm could do better than a tape recorder here.

We don't know what concepts whales talk about

Let them cook. That's how many scientific breakthroughs begin.

Indeed, they don't yet understand meaning.

But a new understanding of the components of the code and their relationships is certainly a breakthrough towards that understanding.

Yes, the headline had me hoping that there was some full understanding (it'd be nice to broadcast to the Orcas off Spain & Gibralter to please not attack the boats), but I can't say that it's clickbait-level.

After harvesting the ozone layer using airships that produce eardrum-splitting noise for decades, the aliens achieved a communication breakthrough and were finally able to communicate to the pesky humans: “Please stop attacking our airships. They are very convenient for us.”

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