One afternoon in January 2024, off the island of Dominica in the Atlantic Ocean, a sperm whale named Pinchy and I drifted calmly at the surface of the water, examining each other.
After several minutes, Pinchy took a long breath, pointed her head downward and slowly began her descent into the ocean. As her 40-foot-long silhouette disappeared, I considered the distances in our worlds. We are both mammals whose time underwater relies on borrowed breaths of air from the surface. But Pinchy had a life that existed a mile underwater; while I lived in a metropolis where buildings stretched toward the sky. I wondered what Pinchy might tell me if I could understand what she was saying.
As a marine biologist studying how whales communicate, my dream is to one day answer that question. My team and I have been able to discern that sperm whales have their own alphabet and that this alphabet seems to be pillared by their own version of vowels. I’ve learned that humans are far from the only species intelligent and complex enough to develop a form of language and culture. At a time when living in a technology-fueled civilization may make us humans feel more distant from the natural world, this discovery helps me feel more connected to it.
Paradoxically, that’s been made possible thanks to the use of technology itself, especially artificial intelligence. What I’ve come to know is that technology and nature do not exist in a zero-sum universe where the ascendance of one side is the downfall of the other. Instead, these tools can give humans an opportunity to feel more tethered to the flora and fauna that surround us.
That revelation has been many years in the making. I’ve spent my career designing technologies that are meant to see and hear from the perspectives of marine creatures, which led me to sperm whales. They are capable of making some of the loudest and most complex sounds in the animal kingdom. When socializing, they emit a series of clicks, called codas.
Several years ago, A.I. technologies like large language models (the systems that power tools like ChatGPT) began to demonstrate an ability to predict word patterns and formulate new sentences on their own. I started to connect with computer science colleagues who wondered if these models could be applied to sperm whale codas. The whale biologist Shane Gero, who has been studying sperm whale families for two decades in the eastern Caribbean, had an annotated sperm whale data set featuring thousands of codas. In a pilot study we ran, A.I. that was fed the data was able to accurately predict the type of coda, the whale’s vocal clan and the individual whale with over 90 percent accuracy.
We then realized it might be possible to use A.I. to study even larger swaths of whale codas, find patterns within the vocal data, and eventually translate what whales were saying to each other.
This gave rise to Project CETI (Cetacean Transition Initiative), a 50-plus person team of marine biologists, A.I. experts, roboticists, linguists, cryptographers and more working to listen to and decode the communication of sperm whales.
This month we published a study that showed sperm whales have what appears to our team to be vowels and diphthongs, and use them in ways similar to how humans do. Later this year we will release Whale Acoustics Model, a novel A.I. system that translates any audio into sperm whale vocalizations — allowing humans to potentially experience, for the first time, what it might be like to interact with a whale in its own language. And we’re developing the first blueprints for how we could evaluate whale communication translations, dismantling barriers between whale and human communication and opening the door to interspecies communication.
Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.
Imagine if we truly understand complex whale communication and can extend our term “language” to them. Such breakthroughs would not only rewrite biology textbooks, but also fundamentally redefine what it means to be human and pave the way to instituting new protections for whales, the ocean and beyond.
Many conservationists perceive technology as a force of extraction and destruction, while many technologists see nature as something to be modeled or optimized. I believe these worlds are not at odds, and when aligned carefully, technology holds the potential to deepen humans’ connection to nature.
This is especially the case when weighing the rise of A.I. There are legitimate concerns about bias, privacy and the automation of human creativity. The idea that machines might take over has long dominated our cultural lexicon. Used carelessly, A.I. could reinforce old hierarchies, treating both people and animals as data points. It could accelerate ecological harm under the guise of progress.
But if used with humility and care, A.I. can become a bridge that reconnects us to the natural world. Just as Copernicus revealed that Earth was not the center of the cosmos, we hope our work could mark a similar shift — a recognition that we are not the only beings with rich internal and communal lives. To me, this is the real potential promise of A.I.: not to make us faster or more efficient, but to make us wiser.
David Gruber is the founder and head of Project CETI, a nonprofit organization and National Geographic Society program. He is a distinguished professor of biology and environmental science at Baruch College, and the City University of New York Graduate Center.
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