Creatures can converse and share their stories by voice or text through visitors’ mobile phones at Museum of Zoology. If the pickled bodies, partial skeletons and stuffed carcasses that fill museums seem a little, well, quiet, fear not.
It is the latest coup for artificial intelligence, dead animals are to receive a new lease of life to share their stories ( I know what you’re thinking, how can it ever be verified) – and even their experiences of the afterlife. Perhaps it will serve more as a novelty project for the owners.
Dead animals can talk after death in Cambridge exhibition
More than a dozen exhibits, ranging from an American cockroach and the remnants of a dodo, to a stuffed red panda and a fin whale skeleton, will be granted the gift of conversation on Tuesday for a month-long project at Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology.
Equipped with personalities and accents, the dead creatures and models can converse by voice or text through visitors’ mobile phones.
“Museums are using AI in a lot of different ways, but we think this is the first application where we’re speaking from the object’s point of view.”
“Part of the experiment is to see whether, by giving these animals their own voices, people think differently about them. Can we change the public perception of a cockroach by giving it a voice?”
Jack Ashby, the museum’s assistant director
For each exhibit, the AI is fed specific details on where the specimen lived, its natural environment, and how it arrived in the collection, alongside all the available information on the species it represents.
The AI-enhanced exhibit also shared its views on whether humans should attempt to bring the species back through cloning. “Even with advanced techniques, the dodo’s return would require not just our DNA but the delicate ecosystem of Mauritius that supported our kind,” it said. “It’s a poignant reminder that the true essence of any life goes beyond the genetic code – it’s intricately woven into its natural habitat.”
The project was devised by Nature Perspectives, a company that is building AI models to help strengthen the connection between people and the natural world. For each exhibit, the AI is fed specific details on where the specimen lived, its natural environment, and how it arrived in the collection, alongside all the available information on the species it represents.