Atlas of Oceanic AI
Designing with Intelligence for the Living Sea
Salish Sea, Vancouver Island.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KAITLYN KRAHN, SNOWLEOPARD STUDIO.
My spirit has always belonged to the sea.
Before I worked with artificial intelligence, I learned to read the rhythms of water. I surfed the misty breaks of Vancouver Island, sailed among the Gulf Islands, and dove through coral gardens off the Thai coast. I grew up in the Okanagan, a semi-arid desert of pines, sagebrush, and sun, while two of my grandparents lived in the Cayman Islands. It was there, as a child, that I first encountered the wonder of sea turtles and the extraordinary biodiversity beneath the surface of the Caribbean reefs.
In the filtered light of the sea, fish drift and dart like fleeting brushstrokes. Each one moves independently, yet together they form a single body like a thought in motion, a ripple of instinct made visible. Silver flashes shimmer in rhythm. Colour shifts in synchrony. Their movement bends and turns as if guided by an ancient intelligence.
Beneath the surface, the world moves differently.
There is an exquisite choreography of mutual awareness. Each fish responds to the slightest change in current, light, or motion beside it. In a human world that often feels chaotic, swimming below the surface feels like coherence. It's a design so intricate that artificial intelligence is only beginning to understand its communication patterns. Scientists and conservationists are now working to preserve this intelligence, not only for the planet’s health but for the meaning it offers to those who listen.
Sperm Whale, Between Worlds
DESIGN BY KAITLYN KRAHN, SNOWLEOPARD STUDIO
Listening Beneath the Surface: Project CETI and the Language of Sperm Whales
While fish move like fluid brushstrokes, whales speak like deep-sea sonnets.
In recent years, scientists and engineers have come together to decode one of the most complex forms of non-human communication ever recorded. These are the patterned click vocalizations of sperm whales. Through an initiative called Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), an interdisciplinary team is using machine learning, natural language processing, and bioacoustics to analyze thousands of hours of whale dialogue recorded in the waters around Dominica in the Caribbean.
What makes CETI so extraordinary is not just its use of advanced artificial intelligence. It is the underlying assumption that animal communication is a valuable form of intelligence. That intelligence deserves to be honoured through design that listens.
Unlike AI applications that aim to control or extract, CETI’s approach is reverent. The goal is not to speak over nature but to speak with it. Researchers are training large language models, similar in architecture to those used for human languages, to identify syntax, structure, and meaning in whale clicks, known as codas. The emerging patterns suggest something astonishing: sperm whales may be exchanging information in a vast, structured, symbolic language.
Here, artificial intelligence becomes more than a tool. It becomes a bridge between worlds, connecting species intelligence with technological intelligence. It becomes a link between data and feeling.
This lifeline inspires my work at the intersection of computing science, trust, and planetary wellbeing.
As part of my academic research, I recently completed a cross-national correlation study exploring the relationship between public trust and national AI readiness using 2024 archival data from 27 countries. What I discovered made me reflect on the deeper paradigms shaping our technological future and the urgent need to centre biodiversity, not just human convenience, in AI development.
My findings showed no positive correlation between citizens’ trust in their governments and those nations’ technical or policy preparedness for AI.
A question emerged through my work:
How can artificial intelligence support human flourishing anchored in ecological resilience if populations lack trust, awareness, or a voice in its design?
Technical capability alone is not enough.
If AI is to serve life, it must also earn trust.
Not through control, but through transparency.
Not through power, but through presence.
Just as CETI listens for meaning in the depths of the sperm whale clicks, we too must learn to listen.
Data is a vital tool for understanding the world. Yet when it is treated as an unquestionable truth and worshipped in place of lived experience with the natural world, we risk losing sight of its limitations and overlooking the wisdom embedded in nature’s language.
It's the ecological signals that will shape the moral structure of AI if we are to evolve with it in our flourishing.
How can you contribute to the intricate natural systems surrounding us, through your appreciation of the Ocean and be a champion for AI that protects the seas?
Get inspired by incredible missions like CETI's:
"We at CETI are unified by the shared goal of applying technology to amplify the magic of our natural world. Our hope is that CETI’s findings will show that technology can bring us closer to nature."
Learn more about Project CETI: https://www.projectceti.org