How Scientists Are Using AI to Talk to Animals - Scientific American

In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that "learned" to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were "saying"--and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. "There's one set of researchers that's keen on finding out whether animals can engage in symbolic communication and another set that says, 'That is anthropomorphizing. We need to ... understand nonhuman communication on its own terms,'" says Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods.