Animal behaviorists are increasingly using AI in their research, but marine researcher Stephanie King argues that the popular narrative about AI helping humans "decode" or "speak" to animals is fundamentally misguided. She contends that this hype misleads both the public and scientists, encouraging premature claims and sensational reporting that distorts what we actually know about animal communication. Rather than focusing on this alluring but problematic goal, scientists should concentrate on understanding what animal communication means to the animals themselves.

King emphasises that despite decades of study, we understand very little about what most animal sounds mean, and that we may never truly comprehend them because animals perceive sound in radically different ways than humans do. For example, dolphins process echolocation information through the brain region connected to touch rather than vision, meaning they may "hear-feel" their way through the world in a way fundamentally inaccessible to human experience. Plugging dolphin whistles and clicks into AI language models cannot bridge this cognitive gap, as the technology assumes a linguistic model that may not apply to how dolphins actually communicate.