Translating the wild: AI, semiotics, and the future of animal communication
Translating the wild: AI, semiotics, and the future of animal communication

Summary/Abstract: This article critically examines the recent rise of AI-based attempts to “translate” animal communication: with a specific focus on aquatic species such as dolphins and whales. Drawing on biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and Umwelt theory, it argues that such projects, while technologically sophisticated, risk reducing animal semiosis to codifiable data structures and computational approximations of meaning. Through an analysis of DolphinGemma and CHAT, the article exposes the epistemological and semiotic limitations of current AI models, contrasting them with embodied, context-sensitive modes of communication in non-human species. Rather than serving as transparent translation tools, AI systems should be understood as technosemiotic infrastructures which may support new interspecies resonances, provided they are embedded within critical and relational frameworks. The analysis advocates for an ecotechnical semiotics which redefines intelligence and communication as emergent, situated, and materially grounded processes, resisting both symbolic reductionism and techno-utopianism.

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