The reported 20 minute conversation between whales and humans-via-AI is interesting and is probably one of the best uses of AI that I can think of (rather than writing gibberish for the Internet).

Of course, this fires up the imagination – effectively, it’s a first contact scenario, which can include all manner of mistakes that could have repercussions. It’s not hard to think of them saying funny things. Imagine chatting with an old, grizzled whale who effectively says, “Get off my lawn!” or a young whale that is going through puberty and is only chatting to impress a female whale somewhere around the planet.

There’s so much that we might get wrong.

Imagine a group of Marine Biologists of the most serious sort chatting with a pod of whales for the first time.

Marine Biologists: *summoning call*

Pod of whales shows up and starts making noise.

Marine Biologists chattering to each other, “What are they saying? They’re talking a lot!” The resident AI expert – Bob, of course – says, “Give it time, give it time, the AI is catching up. There’s a few of them making whale sounds!”

Finally, the AI spits out some text: “What do you want?”

The Marine Biologists start chattering among each other and trying to decide what to send back.

The whales leave since nothing else is happening, making sounds that carry across the oceans around the world…

The Marine Biologists gape at one another as they stare at Bob, who in turn is staring at the screen waiting for the translation:

“There’s someone pretending to be one of us but they don’t know what they want. Ignore them. Fake news!”

One of the Marine Biologists sighs and says, “Well, we screwed that up…”