The Animal Whisperer

When humans come into contact with wildlife, farm animals, and pets, they sometimes run the risk of being injured or killed. They may be attacked by bears, wolves, cows, horses, or dogs. Experts can use an animal’s body language to determine whether or not danger is imminent. Context is also important, such as whether a mother cow is with her calves. The multimodality of large language models enables novel applications. For example, ChatGPT can evaluate images. This ability can be used to interpret the body language of animals, thus using and replacing expert knowledge. Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel, who has been involved with animal-computer interaction and animal-machine interaction for many years, has initiated a project called “The Animal Whisperer” in this context. The goal is to create a prototype application based on GenAI that can be used to interpret the body language of an animal and avert danger for humans. GPT-4 or an open source language model should be used to create the prototype. It should be augmented with appropriate material, taking into account animals such as bears, wolves, cows, horses, and dogs. Approaches may include fine-tuning or rapid engineering. The project will begin in March 2024 and the results will be available in the summer of the same year (Image: DALL-E 3).