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Vivek Thakker/The Guardian Using AI to ‘talk to animals’ might make us feel clever – but what, if anything, does it do for them? As animal behaviorists increasingly use AI in their research, they grapple with how to wield the technology responsibly I’m sitting in a small boat in Shark Bay, Australia, eavesdropping on a conversation between some of Earth’s most intelligent beings. The motor is off, the turquoise sea is glassy, and Stephanie King and I are motionless, transfixed by the whistles, clicks and squeezy, whirring noises made by the dolphins swimming below us. If anyone could tell me what these big-brained social mammals are saying, it would be her. Based at the University of Bristol, she co-leads Shark Bay Dolphin Research, one of the longest-running wild dolphin research projects in the world. She has spent thousands of hours watching and listening to this population. Like most other animal behaviorists, King is increasingly integrating artificial intelligence into her research process. “If it’s used responsibly, AI can transform what we can do with the data we collect,” she says. But when I ask her if AI will someday allow us to “speak dolphin”, she stiffens a little. “I think we’re doing the animals a disservice by focusing on that question,” she says. Dolphins chit-chat in Shark Bay, western Australia Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2026/09/17/1_Dolphins_Chit-chat_Credit_Amy_Martin.mp3 00:00:00 00:00:19 Dolphins communicate, navigate and find food using buzzes, pops, whistles and other acoustic signals. These sounds were recorded in Shark Bay, western Australia via an underwater microphone by Amy Martin for the podcast Threshold The problem, King says, is not AI itself, but the narrative being built around it. She sees her field increasingly framed as a quest for an AI-assisted animal interpreter, with headlines declaring that we’ve almost “cracked the secret language” of various creatures or are about to “decode animals’ speech”. There are even cash prizes for breakthroughs, including the Coller Dolittle Challenge, which seeks an algorithm for communicating with non-human organisms. “It’s a sexy topic,” King acknowledges, but in her view, fundamentally misguided. She believes the allure of tech dollars and media attention is priming the pump of research in some unhealthy ways – nudging scientists to make premature claims about AI-assisted findings, and encouraging them to describe their work in sensational terms. “They tend to be biasing themselves towards the most exciting discovery,” says King, which “misleads us to what we know about these animals”. Bella, a pregnant dolphin at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, watches trainer Adam Gilbert place a hydrophone into the pool to record her underwater sounds in Vallejo, California. Bella had been observed possibly communicating with her unborn baby and is the focus of new research project. Photograph: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images What we know, in many cases, is in fact very little. Take dolphins. “They’ve been studied for decades, but we’re still scratching the surface with what many of the sounds mean,” King says. Sound itself likely means something different to dolphins than it does to us. They can detect pitches far outside our range of hearing, they process acoustic information much faster than we do, and our sensory systems are wired differently in important ways. For example, both humans and dolphins can echolate – or use sound to navigate – but dolphins process echolocation information in the part of the brain connected to touch, while for us, it’s more connected to vision. In other words, instead of “seeing” with sound, dolphins might be hear-feeling, or feel-hearing, their way through their watery world. Whatever that experience is, it may be fundamentally inaccessible to us – and it’s not something we can comprehend by plugging their whistles and squeaks into a large language model. “We need to appreciate that they have a complex communication system that we barely understand,” says King. She believes our focus should be learning about that system – piecing together what dolphin behavior and communication means to other dolphins – rather than trying to hack into it, and start a conversation. Dolphins whistle in Shark Bay Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2026/09/17/2_Dolphins_Whistles_Credit_Stephanie_King_-_Shark_Bay_Dolphin_Research.mp3 00:00:00 00:00:33 These high-pitched whistles are a very important part of dolphins’ social communication. Mothers use them to keep in contact with their calves and some whistles are even used as individual identifiers, or name-like calls. Credit: Stephanie King, Shark Bay Dolphin Research Elephant researcher Joyce Poole agrees. “I get quite exasperated by this goal of being able to talk to the animals,” she says. “I think it’s kind of gimmicky.” One of the world’s leading experts on African savanna elephants, Poole has spent decades observing the animals in the wild, building up a treasure trove of annotated field recordings of their vocalizations, movements and interactions. She’s convinced that there are many layers and nuances of elephant communication that we don’t yet understand, but, like King, she’s skeptical about the concept of inserting ourselves into their dialogues. “Just the basic ability to understand what they have to say and what they are thinking about – that’s enough for me,” she says. “I don’t need to interfere in their lives more than necessary.” Female elephants make noises when a musth male arrives in their group Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2026/09/17/6_Elephants_Female_Chorus_Rumbles_1_Credit_ElephantVoices.mp3 00:00:00 00:00:16 Joyce Poole has documented female elephants making these overlapping sounds when a musth male arrives in their group, looking to breed. She refers to the sounds as “Female Chorus Rumbles” and they may include snorts, trumpets and roars, as well as low-pitched rumbles. Credit: The Elephant Ethogram, ElephantVoices At the same time, Poole believes making the inner lives of elephants more legible to humans could transform how we treat them. “I hope that by showing that they’re capable of a more sophisticated kind of communication that we gain them some respect from our fellow humans, and save a place for them in the world, together with their ecosystems and their other fellow travelers,” she says. Poole’s hope is widely shared, and is likely one of the main reasons so many of us are prone to click on stories with headlines about how AI is going to help us talk to animals. As extinction numbers rise and biodiversity declines, we’re desperate for some good news. Humans are also inherently fascinated by other animals; we’ve been telling stories about listening to and learning from them for as long as we’ve walked the Earth. Our technologies have in many ways cut us off from the rest of the living world – could this be a case when a new tool helps us to better tune into and care for our planetmates? “I do see AI as a potentially promising avenue for knowing more, and understanding better, non-human animal lives,” says César Rodríguez-Garavito, founding director of the More Than Human Life (Moth) program at NYU, a leading hub for research and discourse on the rights of nature. He thinks AI could help give animals a voice in the decisions that shape their lives. “More and more researchers and practitioners are asking themselves, ‘Well, how do we bring in the voices of, say, the whales in the regulation of a marine-protected area,’” he says. It may sound far-fetched to us now, but Rodríguez-Garavito says attempts to bring non-human voices into the realms of law and policy are already under way in countries around the world. “I think that this is no longer a science fiction question,” he says. Of course, we don’t need AI to tell us that whales are being negatively impacted by noise, ship strikes, climate disruption and pollution, but perhaps if we heard a direct translation of them expressing pain from underwater seismic testing, or mourning the loss of a calf killed by a ship, we would be more likely to act. “But I cannot speak about potential benefits without speaking about risks,” Rodríguez-Garavito says. “We have, as human beings, a very mixed track record, to put it gently, in using technologies.” That record tells us that we can’t simply deploy AI in the wild and see what happens; we need to think through the risks ahead of time. There’s the possibility of intentional harm, like using AI-powered tools to trick or coerce animals, perhaps moving them into areas where they’re easier to kill (“I mean, think of trophy hunters,” says Poole). But if the past predicts the future, the greatest threats are not a few people using a new technology with malicious intent, but a whole lot of us using it without thinking about – or choosing to care about – the consequences. “The nightmare scenario is one where we interrupt their communications and their lives at will, just for our entertainment,” says Rodríguez-Garavito. It’s not hard to imagine whale-watching companies using AI to lure animals toward boats, for example, or visitors to Yellowstone national park using apps to provoke wolves to howl, elk to bugle, or bison to bellow, exhausting and confusing the animals. Technologies are not beholden to the intentions of their makers. A tool created with the sincere goal of enhancing our respect for animals could end up having the opposite effect by turning them into playthings that we can pester and control. Researchers in the field talk while recording dolphin buzzes and whistles Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2026/09/17/3_Dolphins_Researchers_in_the_field_Credit_Amy_Martin.mp3 00:00:00 00:00:29 Researchers Stephanie King and Laura Palmer document the movements and behaviors of a group of dolphins in Shark Bay. Buzzes and whistles from the dolphins are being picked up by underwater microphones and played through a speaker on the boat. Credit: Amy Martin, Threshold In an attempt to help steer the field away from these dark scenarios, the Moth program recently published the Pepp framework (prepare, engage, prevent and protect), a set of ethical guidelines for the use of non-human animal communication technologies. But if and how it will actually get put into practice is uncertain. Rodríguez-Garavito says this is a trickle-down effect of the larger absence of legal and ethical boundaries around AI development. “At this point, there is no international agreement on AI,” he says. “It is a free-for-all. I would be much less concerned if we had general principles on what can and cannot be done with AI. There’s nothing like that, and this is why we’re having to develop them from scratch based on what’s been done in other fields of legal practice.” An adult African elephant and a younger calf crossing a dirt track during a game drive in Mikumi, Tanzania. Photograph: Vincenzo Izzo/LightRocket/Getty Images Female elephants rumble Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2026/09/17/7_Elephants_Female_Chorus_Rumbles_2_Credit_ElephantVoices.mp3 00:00:00 00:00:22 Credit: The Elephant Ethogram, ElephantVoices Mickey Pardo, who works with Joyce Poole as a senior scientist at ElephantVoices, also sees potential benefits and risks of AI-assisted animal communication tools, but he also wonders if the speculation is a bit overblown on both sides. “Playbacks can be stressful for animals even without AI – when you’re just taking prerecorded sounds and playing them back – especially if you d [truncated for AI cost control]