Night at the Museum IRL: visitors use AI to chat with dead animals

In museums, you usually see dead animals – pickled bodies, stuffed carcasses, or skeletons. As a rule, they’re quiet. Well, not anymore. Thanks to AI, visitors to Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology can now talk to them.

The museum announced it had teamed up with “Nature Perspectives,” a company building AI models to help strengthen the connection between people and the natural world, to bring 13 of its specimens back to life.

Visitors will only need to find one of the specimens that are part of the project, scan the QR code next to them, and begin chatting to it – either by text or voice – via a chat box on their smartphone. The animals will answer as if they’re still alive.

The specimens include the dodo and whale skeletons, a taxidermied red panda, and a preserved cockroach. The researchers hope that the month-long experiment will help them learn more about how AI can help people to “better engage with nature.”

“This is an amazing opportunity for people to test out an emerging technology in our inspiring Museum setting, and we also hope to learn something about how our visitors see the animals on display,” said Jack Ashby, assistant director of the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology.

“Our whole purpose is to get people engaged with the natural world. So we're curious to see whether this will work and whether chatting with the animals will change people’s attitudes towards them. Will the cockroach be better liked, for example, as a result of having its voice heard?”

Indeed, I’m curious to know whether the dodo will lament its inability to fly, and its eventual extinction. And will the cockroach complain that it’s really unjust for people to be disgusted by it?

The simulations are also age-adaptive, meaning that visitors of all ages will be able to converse with the specimens. We wonder, though, if a child will want to ask the red panda, for example, how it was prepared for display in the museum.

That’s one of the details that specific specimens are ready to provide, it turns out. And you don’t have to speak English, by the way – the animals are multilingual, speaking over 20 languages including Spanish and Japanese.

The project's creators hope to reverse apathy toward the biodiversity crisis. According to the most recent figures, wildlife populations plunged by an average of 69% between 1970 and 2018.

As one study suggests, species are dying off as much as 1,000 times more frequently than before the arrival of humans 60 million years ago. The situation is so dire that scientists and authors have already begun warning of a sixth mass extinction of life on Earth.