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AI can tell you what your cat is thinking. But do you really want to know?
Paging Doctor Dolittle to a white courtesy telephone
Meet Dr Catz, scientist. Source: Midjourney.
According to The Guardian, researchers are exploring the use of AI to communicate with cats. Because, of course they are.
Researchers at the University of Kansas and Lyons College in Arkansas have been taking a very close look at feline-on-feline interactions. They found that cats have a range of 276 different expressions when communicating with other cats. (With humans they have three: Feed me, scratch my belly, and get the f*** away from me.)
From their paper, published by Science Direct:
We observed the behavior of 53 adult domestic shorthair cats at CatCafé Lounge in Los Angeles, CA. Using Facial Action Coding Systems designed for cats, we compared the complexity and compositionality of facial signals produced in affiliative and non-affiliative contexts.
Affiliative cat (left), non-affiliative (right). [1] Sources: Medibank, the Interwebs.
I’m imagining them writing the grant proposal for this, sitting in some shitty Midwestern college cafeteria in the dead of winter. “Let’s get the f*** out of Kansas and somewhere warm so we can study cats. Pack the sunscreen, honey, we're headed to LA.”
Now researchers want to apply AI to these images, so they can decipher what cats are thinking at any given moment. The idea is to just let AI loose on it and figure out what’s going on in that inscrutable feline brain.
And it’s not just cats. Per The Guardian:
Among those looking at such applications is Dr Elodie Briefer, an associate professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Copenhagen. Her research has shown AI can be trained to classify pig vocalisations to distinguish between pigs that are happy and those that are not...
Briefer added that her team were hoping in future work to couple such findings with AI-based analysis of pigs’ body postures and expressions. “You can get much more information if you use AI on both vocalisations and videos to study facial expressions and body movements,” she said.
In other words, we may soon finally be able to answer the question, What’s shakin’, Bacon? [2]
What's up, dog?
Other animals getting the Dr. Dolittle treatment include zebras, white rhinos, parakeets, prairie dogs, dolphins, naked mole rats, and sperm whales. The idea is to use AI to identify patterns in animal calls that humans might not perceive, then to correlate these sounds to common behaviors, creating a kind of crude vocabulary.
For example, Northern Arizona University biologist Con Slobodchikoff has been studying Gunnison's prairie dogs. He found that these adorable little critters “have unique ‘words’ for people, hawks, coyotes and pet dogs... which also includes information about size, shape, and color.”
Slobodchikoff created an experiment where he had similar looking women wearing blue, green, and yellow T-shirts cruise through a prairie dog colony. The dogs yelped a different ‘word’ when the women wore different colors. Now he’s using AI to find new p-dog speech patterns.
This is what prairie dogs sound like when humans walk by. That, or someone stepped on one of their chew toys. Source: Science News Explores.
So yes, your worst fears have been confirmed. The animals are talking about us behind our backs and commenting on our fashion sense.
A coterie of Gunnison's prairie dogs, judging you for wearing flip-flops with socks. Source: Alchetron.
Slobodchikoff, who is author of a book titled Chasing Dr. Doolittle: Learning the Language of Animals, has since turned his attention to dogs (our best friends, not the prairie kind). Per Scientific American:
Slobodchikoff is developing an AI model aimed at translating a dog's facial expressions and barks for its owner. He has no doubt that as researchers expand their studies to domestic animals, machine-learning advances will reveal surprising capabilities in pets. “Animals have thoughts, hopes, maybe dreams of their own,” he says.
Meanwhile, researcher Alison Barker at Germany’s Max Planck Institute has discovered that each colony of naked mole rats has its own distinct dialect. And that’s not all:
“They have a specific ‘toilet’ call,” Alison Barker says. Only the queen and breeding males use it. It’s like a song they sing as they urinate.”
It goes like this:
I do exactly the same thing when I urinate. [3]
Gorilla or go home
Honestly, until I started researching this post, I hadn't realized just how much effort is going into using AI to understand animal communications, and even start to figure out how to communicate back. I suspect we’re about to learn a lot of things we’d rather not know. Just a gut feeling.
Also, scientists warn against rushing too quickly into conversations with our furry/feathery friends. Again, per The Guardian:
But, as Rutz and his colleagues have recently noted, there could be potential pitfalls too – not least should researchers attempt communication with animals in their own “language” before such signals are fully understood. “We urgently need to agree on ethical standards for this kind of work to prevent unintended harm or misuse,” he said.
Because you definitely don’t want to say the wrong thing to this guy.
If you could talk to the animals, what would you say? Post your thoughts (barks, meows, squeaks) in the comments below.
[1 Grumpy Cat on the right (real name: Tardar Sauce) was an Internet celebrity at one point in time, racking up millions of followers on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. She published a book, got an endorsement deal from Friskies, and appeared in her own video game. Tardar passed in 2019 at the tender age of 7. Maybe if she were a little cheerier she’d have lived longer.
[2] Thanks, I’ll show myself out.
[3] Usually show tunes or sea chanteys. It's really fun at ballgames and concerts. Sometimes I get the entire men's room to sing along.
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