Upcoming: Finding New Patterns in Animal Communication with AI: Ethical and Legal Implications, with Gašper Beguš
July 19 2025, 16:00 GMT/ 12:00 EST/ 09:00 PST (4 pm GMT/ 12 pm EST/ 9 am PST)
New Patterns in Animal Communication with AI: Ethical and Legal Implications
Sperm‑whale vocalizations rank among the animal kingdom’s most intriguing communication systems. Until now, their click clusters (“codas”) were treated as a Morse‑code‑like repertoire. Using explainable deep‑learning techniques called CDEV, Dr. Gašper Beguš will present acoustic evidence that codas function as vowel‑like units: they have structured and discretely distributed formants, display systematic duration contrasts and distributional patterns, and participate in co‑articulation. These properties reveal a strikingly structured, combinatorial phonology that parallels human language more closely than most other non‑human systems described to date. This discovery extends beyond biology.
Beguš will examine how detecting human‑like linguistic structures in whales challenges prevailing assumptions about non‑human communicative competence and their legal status. He’ll further discuss how the linguistic behavior of non-humans helps us understand the relationship between language, intelligence, and thought. By integrating interpretable AI with linguistic theory and law, this work situates sperm‑whale communication at the forefront of language research and reframes the conversation on the philosophical, ethical, and legal status of human and non‑human communication.
About the speaker
Gašper Beguš is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he bridges the fields of linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. His research centers on interpretable AI and the study of language in humans, animals, and machines.
Dr. Beguš leads efforts to develop techniques that help us better understand the inner workings of AI. In his Berkeley Speech and Computation lab, he also builds the most realistic models of human language learning—creating an artificial baby language learner. Serving as the Linguistics Lead at Project CETI, a non-profit dedicated to listening to sperm whales, he researches one of the most intriguing communication systems in the animal kingdom. His recent research discovered that sperm whales have equivalents to human vowels.
This talk will be hosted on Zoom, please register below to receive a calendar invitation including link to join.
