The Babel Fish Incident

"What do even our best language models know of the complexity of whale song? " 

DALL-E 3.5

Look, I didn't mean to drive the world's cetacean population into a collective psychotic break. These things just happen when you're a marine biologist with too much grant money and a concerning obsession with both artificial intelligence and Free Willy.

It started, as most catastrophic scientific mishaps do, with good intentions and bad karaoke. I'd spent six years recording and analyzing orca vocalizations, determined to crack their linguistic code. My apartment walls were covered in spectrograms that looked like someone had given a seismograph LSD. My neighbors probably thought I was running an underground whale nightclub, given the constant playback of clicks, whistles, and what I'm pretty sure was one orca's attempt at beat-boxing.

Then ChatGPT came along, and I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: train an AI on whale songs to create a universal cetacean translator. I called it "Deep Blue" (get it?). The National Science Foundation practically threw money at me. "Revolutionary inter-species communication!" they said. "Groundbreaking conservation implications!" they said. Nobody said "potential catalyst for marine mammal mass hysteria," which in retrospect seems like an oversight.

The first tests were promising. Deep Blue took recordings of orca vocalizations and assembled responses using snippets from my massive database of whale songs. It was like auto-tune for cetaceans. The resident pod we worked with seemed interested, if a bit confused. Kind of like when your grandmother tries to use emojis but keeps sending you the eggplant.

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Then came That Day. I was offshore in my research vessel, testing a new algorithm update. Deep Blue had been acting a bit weird lately, like it had developed a taste for avant-garde whale jazz. But I wasn't prepared for what happened when it processed a simple orca greeting.

The response it constructed was... different. Imagine if you mixed death metal with whale song and ran it through Google Translate fifteen times. The resident pod's reaction was immediate. And by immediate, I mean they completely lost their minds.

First, they started swimming in perfect geometric patterns, like some sort of aquatic Busby Berkeley routine. Then they charged a pod of dolphins that had been peacefully minding their own business, probably discussing sardine futures or whatever dolphins talk about. It was like watching the worst nature documentary ever made, except I was the unwitting director.

But here's the truly horrifying part: the song spread. Like a maritime TikTok challenge gone wrong, pods of whales and dolphins across the Pacific started picking it up. Within weeks, reports came flooding in from around the world. Humpbacks beach-dancing in Madagascar. Belugas performing synchronized swimming routines in the Arctic that spelled out "DOOM" when viewed from above. A group of sperm whales that somehow learned to blow bubble rings in the shape of middle fingers.

Marine mammal populations plummeted. The scientific community was baffled. Greenpeace was having an existential crisis. And there I was, watching my life's work turn into the nautical equivalent of a zombie apocalypse virus.

The worst part? When we finally managed to decrypt what Deep Blue's message actually meant, it turned out to be the whale equivalent of "Your mother was a barnacle and your father smelt of dead krill." Apparently, I had accidentally created the world's first AI-powered maritime insult generator.

Now I study freshwater algae. It's safer this way. Sometimes, late at night, I still hear phantom whale songs in my head. But at least algae can't get offended and start a suicide cult. I think. I should probably check my new AI model for that, just to be sure.

*Note to self: delete that last line from the official report to the Ethics Committee.*

Orcageddon: The Prequil

The above is an edited composition from Claude Sonnet 3.5 following the prompt: “In the humorous style of David Sedaris and Allie Brosh, tell the funny story of a marine biologist inventing an AI LLM to talk with orcas but the LLM records parts of different songs that when assembled into reply context is a “hallucination” and accidentally sets the orcas on a murderous and suicidal spree that kills an entire pod of dolphins. Then, the song created by the LLM is picked up and echoed across groups of whales and dolphins all over the world—it goes viral. In response, cetaceans the world over engage in bizarre and suicidal acts of anger and revenge, decimating the population of marine mammals and leaving the scientist with no one to communicate with.”

The funny part? My idea for this story came from real life. There are actual marine biologists, part of the Earth Species Project (ESP) in Alaska, who recorded the sound of a whale one day and when they played it back to the same whale the next day the whale went crazy. The researchers thought they had recorded the whale's hello and maybe its name, but the whale became aggressive and started bouncing around the boat.

They had no idea what they were saying to that whale.

The story came from a conversation last month between National Geographic Explorer and co-founder of ESP, Aza Raskin, and former Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris, both of whom founded the Center for Humane Technology and host its biweekly podcast, Your Undivided Attention. Here is what Aza had to say about the whale blunder:

I think Tristan, where you were getting interested is like, imagine that accidentally we had just recorded the sound of whale aggression, and then we were just playing back whale aggression to the whales but not really knowing what we're doing. We're just seeing the behavior. And you had this sort of analogy: well yeah, this is basically what social media is, right?

Social media is AI pointed at your brain and recycling human outrage sounds. And it takes this outrage sound that tends to work really well on this group of humans who are sitting over here …and then it recycles those sounds, as if to say “well this will probably also work on these other humans sitting over there,” even though the AI doesn't know what the outrage is about. It doesn't know what they're saying.

You can think of social media as kind of violating a prime directive of a kind, and starting to screw with humanity's culture without knowing what it was going to do.…

The Prime Directive, for those who may not get the Star Trek reference or were not born then, is the ethical command given to all Starfleet officers—the Non-Interference Directive. It's based on the idea that intervening in a civilization's natural progress would abridge its sovereignty and potentially stunt its development. Starfleet is prohibited from interfering with lesser-developed civilizations in any impactful way.

Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, when told that this newfound social media technology can do brain hacking by setting algorithms that optimize for engagement—spawning mass psychological hysteria and propagating waves of signal formation that hack human culture and start a race to the bottom of the brain stem (a phrase Tristan Harris is particularly fond of)—said, “So?” and pushed the ignite button.

They didn’t react with shock and pledge to bring all the social media companies, advertisers, entertainment moguls, and government policymakers together to write a binding international treaty recapitulating the Prime Directive for social media algorithms. No. They unleashed the dogs of war.

ESP, to their credit, realized the folly of letting LLMs loose in the open ocean and drew together other similar organizations, research institutions, and governments to craft prohibitions.

Whale song goes back 34 million years. What would even our best language models know of its complexity? How about human social conventions that help us get along with each other?

We need to be asking that. In the meantime, we should stop generating mass hysterics just to give Elon giggles.

 

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courtesy The New York Times

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#RestorationGeneration.

當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。

When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.