In a Tokyo Lab AI Helps Chickens Reveal Their Innermost Feelings

Researchers from the University of Tokyo think they can decipher the emotional states of chickens based on the birds’ vocalizations. It sounds borderline silly, but the scientists are quite serious.

“Leveraging advanced mathematical models in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning,” they write in the journal Research Square, “we have developed a system capable of interpreting various emotional states in chickens, including hunger, fear, anger, contentment, excitement, and distress.”

Discerning the emotional states of nonhuman animals is notoriously tricky, if not impossible. Here the researchers deployed something called Deep Emotional Analysis Learning, for which they recorded 200 hours of 80 chickens clucking. A team of eight animal psychologists and veterinary surgeons identified the various emotional states associated with different clucks – hunger, fear, etc – for the first 100 hours, then fed their data to DEAL. The AI used the information to analyze the remaining 100 hours, and was able to pair clucks with corresponding emotions with surprising accuracy.

If any of this turns out to be real, it could have big implications for understanding and improving animal welfare on the farm, in zoos, and wherever else humans interact with the rest of the animal kingdom. The researchers say they plan to create an app based on the technology that allows lines of communication to run both ways, so we may soon be able to both listen and talk to the animals. If artificial intelligence can actually deliver a Doctor Dolittle app, then all the risks of the much-hyped tech will have been worth it.

We should note that Research Square is not a peer-reviewed journal, but preliminary findings on the chicken research have also been submitted to Nature Scientific Reports, so we’ll see how that goes.

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