Animal Lang(communication)uage

(Animal linguistics: a primer)

One of the many distractions of my graduate school years was the debate on what constitutes a language and whether it was a uniquely human artifice (e.g., only humans use language, animals use “communication systems”). An excellent recent paper, “Animal Linguistics: A Primer,” nicely side-steps the landmines to find useful tools and new common ground.

With recent advances in Generative AI, this ground springs new life. For example, the Earth Species Project has been orchestrating an ecosystem that is working on applying AI to solve animal communication problems. Then, there is the philosophical conundrum goaded by large language models and their “promiscuous ability” to learn all sorts of human languages. As Rodney Brooks asked when machines start learning our languages, how uniquely human can these artifices be?