AI Is Decoding Whales’ Communications. Could That Be a Turning Point in the Push for Their Rights?

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Dahleh-Llama@reddit

Lol AI haven't found a job it would admit it can't do. It's like my meth head uncle that has never met an impossible challenge

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somethingwholesomer@reddit

It even offers to do stuff for you and then when you accept is like, oh actually I can’t do that yet.

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RuthlessIndecision@reddit

Can we trust AI to interpret whale song accurately. Amfor all we know AI could conspire with Big Porpoise to our demise.

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Dry_System9339@reddit

If they claim to have two way communication then have a whale pass a message to another scientist.

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ZakA77ack@reddit

This story keeps getting reposted here like every month. It hasn't resulted in anything but selling a dream without any substance. Hell LLMs don't even get English right all the time

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Tech oligarchs are reaching for more ways to delay the bubble burst another week or another month. Just kicking the can down the road. "Keep investing in us! Even though we've failed to deliver any of our promises, we think this is finally going to be the one!"

They're obsessed with promoting all sorts of nonsense applications to try to monetize their technology. They're grasping for straws. It's nothing more than marketing hype. Investors have to realize this by now, but they're afraid to admit it because no one wants to start the race to the bottom when the mass sell-off begins to snowball...

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LeeHide@reddit

This only works if we have a dataset of already decoded communication. People are so gullible with the intelligent computer

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SuggestionEphemeral@reddit

"It's saying... Sam Altman rulez... buy crypto... Brawndo's got what plants crave... don't miss this blowout sale... brought to you by Carl's Jr."

We've degraded as a society to the point where we allow corporations to tell us what's true, instead of academic researchers. The quest for money has surpassed the quest for knowledge as humanity's ultimate goal. Intellectual honesty among the virtues has been replaced by profitability; inquiry and advancement by shareholder value.

The same issue exists with AI "decoding" brainwaves. It's writing a script to assign meaning to certainly fluctuations based on probabilities. The existence of bias in the algorithm is unavoidable, and driven by the datasets. No matter how large their study group, it will be impossible to generalize and extrapolate the data to the whole population, because a pattern that might indicate one thing for one person might indicate something totally different for another. And that's aside from the fact that self-reporting only accounts for conscious thoughts, while brain activity reflects a consortium of unknown and unknowable cognitive processes.

It's the same for whales. There's no way to know what they're saying other than to assume, which by nature involves heavily biased heuristics. Whereas they might be saying "Oh, there's some lovely krill down here" or "The water's getting cold, maybe it's time to migrate soon," all a researcher can do is guess. And if the people collecting the data and writing the algorithms work for a tech company, instead of being career marine biologists dedicated to understanding whales, then what kind of biases do you think are going to manifest themselves in the data?

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