Project Vision 21

“Why does the bird sing?” said the Master. “Not because he has a statement, but because he has a song.” Anthony De Mello, The Song of the Bird

A recent article published in National Geographic describes a fascinating experiment in which experts from the University of Buenos Aires created a “robot tutor” that, using artificial intelligence (AI), taught young birds how to sing songs they hadn’t learned from adult birds.

The researchers compared recordings from the 1960s of the songs sung by these birds (the Rufous-collared sparrows, locally known as chingolos) with modern recordings from 2020. They found that while some songs from 60 years ago had endured, others had vanished. Using mathematical models, the AI generated “synthetic songs,” which the birds responded to as if they were natural ones.

According to the article, the young chingolos (Zonotrichia capensis), incorporated the synthetic songs into their repertoire in a way that was “statistically indistinguishable” from how they adopted real birds’ songs. The researchers believe this experiment shows that new technologies can “preserve and even revive” the “cultural aspects” of biodiversity.

In simple terms, the synthetic songs gained “biological credibility” among the birds—they were accepted as their own—thus supporting the recovery of a “cultural diversity” that might otherwise have been lost.

This fascinating Argentine experiment marks a significant advance in the use of AI and robotics for both conservation and the study of animal culture. but it raises numerous and unsettling questions.

We can’t compare chingolos in a park near Buenos Aires with the complexity and diversity of 21st-century humanity, but if AI has proven it can alter the culture of birds, it’s clear it can alter our culture as well.

Put differently, just as the chingolos accepted the synthetic songs taught by the robot tutors and gave those songs the same credibility as the natural ones, are we humans now singing “synthetic songs” to which we uncritically grant the same credibility and acceptance as if they were “natural”?

From another angle, are we delegating to AI the creation and teaching of new “songs” (narratives, thoughts, ideas, perspectives) that younger generations will absorb to fill the void left by what they didn’t learn from their own parents? Perhaps we should recognize that “social media” has already become our robot tutor.

Let me be clear: I fully understand that an experiment with birds in South America cannot be generalized to all of humanity. But I can’t stop thinking about the many experiments with mice or guinea pigs that eventually led to real-world actions—sometimes in favor of, sometimes against—human beings.

Maybe these Argentine chingolos are acting like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, warning us that the boundary between “artificial” and “natural” has become blurred—perhaps even erased—and with it, the lines between reality and fantasy, truth and illusion, culture and algorithms, and even between past and future.

The experiment with the chingolos reflects the possibility that our own cultural creations—art, rituals, traditions, knowledge, and wisdom—could, thanks to AI, disappear and be re-created as easily as the birds’ songs, while we humans remain as unaware of this shift as the chingolos were of theirs.