I was at a party a few years ago. It was a bunch of technical nerds. Somehow the conversation drifted to human communication with animals, Alex the grey parrot, and the famous Koko the gorilla. It wasn't in SF, so there had been cocktails, and one of the nerds (it wasn’t me) sort of cautiously asked “You guys know that stuff is completely made up, right?”

He was cautious, I think, because people are extremely at ease imputing human motives and abilities to pets, cute animals, and famous gorillas. They are simultaneously extremely uneasy casting scientific shade on this work that’d so completely penetrated popular culture and science communication. People want to believe even if dogs and gorillas can’t actually speak, they have some intimate rapport with human language abilities. If there's a crazy cat lady at the party, it doesn’t pay to imply she's insane to suggest Rufus knows or cares what she's saying.

With the advent of AI, the non-profit Project CETI was founded in 2020 with a charter mission of understanding sperm whale communications, and perhaps even communicating with the whales ourselves. Late last year, an allied group of researchers published Begus et al.: “Vowel- and [...]