Sounds like utter bullshit to me, but we’ll see what the peer review process comes out with.
Nobody should be reporting on studies that haven’t been peer reviewed. It’s often sensationalist nonsense, much like drugs that haven’t gone through clinical trials yet.
Interesting that they think there's a single universal voice amongst hens. I've got a small flock of a dozen birds, and they each have distinct voices and calls. You can always tell who just finished laying by which egg song you're hearing, until the others join in and it's a cacophony.
We've got one anericauna who likes to "scream" for her egg song. Awful sound, very close to a hen screaming because a bobcat got her.
I don't think that they think that. All humans have different voices, yet it's pretty easy to tell what mood someone is in, even if you don't know the languages. Why would you assume that chickens express these so differently that it can't be interpreted automatically, when the same is possible for us with much higher ranges of possible expressions?
It wouldn't have to be a universal voice, just something consistent in the noise. Neat thing with lots of AI training is we don't have to necessarily even have a theory of what the AI is picking out. It just has to be in the training data and our hints during training have to be appropriate.
If they're not getting consent from those chickens to use their clucks as training data they're engaging in animal abuse. Stealing their voices, how cruel.
They’re violating the chickens intellectual property by training the model on the chickens sounds without legally binding consent from the chickens to train on their data.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the chickens banded together and sued for copyright infringement.
The AI system is based on a technique the researchers called "Deep Emotional Analysis Learning," which can adapt to changing vocal patterns.
The study found that the system was capable of translating "various emotional states in chickens, including hunger, fear, anger, contentment, excitement, and distress."
The researchers tested the system on 80 chickens for the study and collaborated with a team of animal psychologists and veterinarians.
The system was able to achieve surprisingly high accuracy in identifying the birds' emotional states, the study found.
"The high average probabilities of detection for each emotion suggest that our model has learned to capture meaningful patterns and features from the chicken sounds," it said.
The researchers acknowledged potential limitations, including variations in breeds and the complexity of some communications, such as body language.
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Adrian (the PI) is such an unusual, mad genius kind of guy. Peer reviewed or not, it would be cool if he and others managed to help us understand animals better.