Talking to animals is AI’s next ethical minefield: Researchers are using AI to decipher animal calls and communications, presenting ethical dilemmas, according to Bloomberg. (subscription required).
Researchers doing the work say that “if humans better understand the interior world of other species, they are less likely to shrug at climate change, endorse industrial farming or participate in habitat loss.”
“Yet human innovation also has a long track record of using technology against animals, says César Rodríguez-Garavito, director of the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at New York University. Twentieth century whalers used advances in sonar to drive panicked whales to the surface to be killed. Poachers have copied the tribal practice of mimicking bird calls during hunting, using automated and looped recordings to lure birds into traps…..
“‘AI has potential for greater harm at scale,’ says Rodríguez-Garavito. In a 2025 report, he and his co-authors presented a dystopian vision of how ‘nonhuman animal communication technologies (NACTs)’ could expose animals to mobs of humans wanting to chat, leverage them for military purposes like sea mine detection or even be used to capture and kill them.”