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The Babel Fish Incident
What do even our best language models know of the complexity of whale song?
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.