This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here. Whale songs have long been an obsession for scientists, science-fiction readers, and popular culture alike. Are they something like an alien language? And what do they say about how the minds of these giant creatures operate? Decades after the first whale song was recorded, artificial intelligence might be able to offer answers. As my colleague Ross Andersen reported in a recent feature for The Atlantic, an international group of scientists called Project CETI is working to design AI translation tools that would allow people to communicate with sperm whales. While the research remains theoretical and would require a significant technological breakthrough to actually come to fruition, the effort is not too dissimilar from chatbots and existing programs, such as Google Translate. I spoke with Ross last week about his breathtaking story, AI translation devices, and how the serious possibility of communicating with cetaceans could unsettle …