[HN Gopher] Design and evaluation of a parrot-to-parrot video-ca...
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Design and evaluation of a parrot-to-parrot video-calling system
(2023)
Author : michalpleban
Score : 123 points
Date : 2025-05-06 11:03 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| duxup wrote:
| > others would want to show another bird their toys
|
| Reminds me of what some people who worked at a facility that took
| in parrots and similar animals whose owners couldn't care for
| them.
|
| They described the birds as little kids, except they can fly and
| have powerful beaks. Some of them have very strong "destructive"
| urges too / they want to take everything apart and so on.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I have great respect for anyone who does this type of work.
|
| Far too many people acquire animals that they aren't able or
| willing to take proper care of, and parrots have very long
| lives.
| duxup wrote:
| Agreed, I respect those folks a lot, not exactly a high
| paying job / seems like a very personal calling kinda job.
|
| They also get to know the birds in a very personal way it
| seemed. One bird was "upset" with one of the handlers so she
| didn't want to participate when we met the birds that day.
| Apparently that handler had broken up a fight between upset
| bird and another that morning. Upset bird took that
| personally.
|
| At the same time upset bird didn't want to miss out on
| meeting everyone so she came along with two other birds who
| met us.... upset bird just sorts of sat on the periphery and
| made sure that everyone knew she wasn't participating. She
| wanted folks to know she was there, but was not going to
| perform.
| gadders wrote:
| I was on a zoom call with a colleague and we were both WFH. His
| dog started barking, which made my dog start barking as well.
|
| Not sure if they were conveying any information to each other,
| but they seemed to enjoy it.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| "I'm here!"
|
| "I'm over here!"
| mdp2021 wrote:
| There was a gag from Gary Larson depicting the inventor of
| dog-to-human language translator: he walked on a street where
| dogs were all shouting, "Hey! Hey!".
|
| ...Found it: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/...
| dmurray wrote:
| And an SMBC comic, perhaps inspired by Larson, where all
| the animals are shouting "Do me! Do me!"
|
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/springtime
| gs17 wrote:
| It works for a lot of animals, although sometimes it's
| "HEY!", sometimes it's "heyyyy".
| wpietri wrote:
| I was reading some scholarly work on raven calls. It got into
| a ton of detail, but it opened with the notion that the
| fundamental message of every call is "here I am". There were
| often other messages on top of that (e.g., "here I am near a
| hawk", "here I am near food", etc), but somehow I'd never
| realized that was always the base.
| jbattle wrote:
| Not being snarky - most social media content is also
| essentially someone saying "here I am!" (Near a beach, near
| food). Maybe ravens share some existential angst with
| humans. Or maybe they are just more physically spread out
| and need to keep in touch.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Very cool! But was the video client open source?
|
| https://kottke.org/11/10/richard-stallmans-rider
| srean wrote:
| You be good. I love you.
|
| https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/
|
| Corvids, parrots are extremely intelligent. How so or why so,
| considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well
| understood.
|
| If you can do grab a copy of Alex and Me.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3018307-alex-me
| syndeo wrote:
| That was great, thank you for sharing.
| srean wrote:
| Pleasure's all mine. It's one of my favourite short stories.
| jstrieb wrote:
| If you liked that story, you should really read the full
| anthology, called _Exhalation_. Ted Chiang is a wonderful
| writer, and there are a lot of great stories in that book. I
| think my favorite was _The Merchant and the Alchemist 's
| Gate_.
| srean wrote:
| Yes indeed. _Merchant ..._ was such a delightful story.
| dinfinity wrote:
| A bit offtopic, but it's funny how people call parrots/birds
| "extremely intelligent" and AI/LLMs "just stochastic parrots
| devoid of any intelligence", even though their capabilities are
| very obviously far more like the inverse of those
| qualifications (show me a video where someone has even a basic
| extended back and forth conversation with a bird).
|
| There is a pretty clear double standard there.
|
| Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion
| 'forebrain' neurons (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
| ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron
| range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the
| total would be 1 trillion synapses.
|
| If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses,
| then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size
| ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models
| ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with
| regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.
| rubylark wrote:
| I think it's a difference in expectation. For some reason,
| people are surprised that birds have the same intelligence
| level as a human toddler. However no one wants an AI
| assistant that's as dumb as a toddler.
| bryceacc wrote:
| uh.. AI/LLMs were created to be smart, and they sometimes
| meet that expectation. We did not create parrots, we just get
| surprised when they show off intelligence
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The local crows will take the nuts in the shell we leave out
| in winter, and hide them in the gutters of the neighbors
| house. Many hours later they will return to pick off the
| softer shells.
|
| We like having the crows around, as they mitigate the mice
| and voles in the garden. Notably, this group of birds remain
| mostly silent during the nesting season if they recognize
| you, but still try to catch your attention by bouncing on the
| metal fence if they associate you with the feeder (mimicking
| any sounds you made during prior encounters.)
|
| They are problem solvers, recognize individual people, and
| often do odd things like swing on the loop of fiber optic
| cable for what I assume is fun.
|
| Notably, many Corvidae often pass the self-awareness tests
| that most pets like dogs will fail.
|
| These animals should not be kept as pets, but are fascinating
| to live around =3
| RachelF wrote:
| > How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to
| their body, is not well understood.
|
| One factor is neuron size. Bird neurons are around 0.4 the
| length of mammalian neurons, so you can pack in around 8 times
| the neurons in a given volume.
|
| A large parrot has the same number of neurons as a medium sized
| dog.
| rwmj wrote:
| Feels like they need to develop a parrot-friendly input device
| and a little automation to complete the call.
| tonylemesmer wrote:
| ...and that might even yield a better product for humans :)
| xrd wrote:
| I worry the next step will be to create a social media site for
| parrots and then they will be just as lonely and angry as we
| humans.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Parrots communicate in a realm of which we can suppose that the
| possibility for the expression of gratuitous stupidity is
| limited.
|
| --
|
| There remains the visceral - which instead is a potential part
| of that realm:
|
| > _The study involved experienced parrot handlers who had the
| time and energy to keep tabs on their birds' behavior - at the
| first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they
| ended the calls_
|
| Solution learnt: building a social network where interactions
| are interpolated by an assistant.
| axus wrote:
| That would feel dystopian for a human: at the first sign of
| emotion, your browser tab closes
| manarth wrote:
| At the first sign of harmful interaction / insults /
| threats, your browser tab closes
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I wish this concept would develop a little more nuance, there's
| a lot of good that happens via social media and we can maybe
| separate that from the somewhat perverse incentives social
| media _companies_ foist upon people to become valuable.
| g-b-r wrote:
| There's a lot of good that happens via internet
| communication, social media is inherently toxic.
|
| Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media
| traditionally meant things similar to Facebook, so real
| names, over-sharing of your life, falsehood, data collection,
| and what that leads to.
|
| Anything good that might happen on social networks, is a
| result of a large portion of the population (disgracefully)
| being on them.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I don't think social media is _inherently_ toxic -- I
| remember early time-based social media feeds and problems
| felt a lot smaller (though of course audiences were
| smaller). Even looking back at livejournal as social media,
| things were sometimes dramatic, but also a lot different.
|
| Maybe it's impossible to make monolithic social media non-
| toxic because of all the levers also required to make it
| profitable via engagement.
|
| It's _very_ hard to distinguish social media from the
| algorithms that certainly reward toxic behavior today. You
| can look at Mastodon as a possible less-toxic counter-
| example, but we 're now in a place where the audience
| demographics diverge so it's hard to be certain either way.
| mncharity wrote:
| > monolithic
|
| Parents have written of setting up a local minecraft
| server for kids, and their friends, a neighborhood, or a
| school. Is setting up a local social media server also a
| thing?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I believe you can do this with Mastodon, you can turn off
| all the federation features and have an individual
| twitter-like social network you can invite your friends
| to join.
|
| More commonly people are using groupchats on WhatsApp,
| Discord, or Slack for this... it's easier than
| maintaining it yourself (but there are also plenty of
| self-host options for chat networks too).
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Social networks for birds:
|
| Bird Roulette
|
| BeakBook
|
| CagedIn
|
| Instasquawk
|
| And ........... Twitter
| rsynnott wrote:
| OnlyFan[tail pigeon]s.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| OnlyFeathers was right there!
| jamager wrote:
| This made my day, thanks!
| benob wrote:
| I wonder whether they used a mirror or simple recordings as
| baseline
| gmoore wrote:
| Finally - a good use for technology!
| bArray wrote:
| I have a male Barraband (Superb) parrot [1] and he can scroll
| videos on Youtube, select the ones with birds in and play those.
| People are in disbelief when the bird starts watching bird videos
| on his tablet. His "screen time" is not every day and limited to
| a few hours. I would love for him to be able to call other birds,
| he is smart enough to be able to pull that off right now.
|
| I have noticed some new behaviours recently:
|
| 1. If I'm eating the bird will beg me for food. I have been able
| to get him to try any foods that he sees me eating.
|
| 2. My bird has a high demand for proteins, which he gets somewhat
| in nuts (limited due to fats) and he will steal meat whenever
| possible. The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he
| will steal it when he can.
|
| 3. He now makes a wider variety of noises, far beyond any video I
| have seen of his species. I believe he is trying to replicate
| human speech and gets close in tone. We talk to him regularly and
| I think he tries to talk back.
|
| Anybody else experience strange behaviours with their birds?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superb_parrot
| firefax wrote:
| >His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours.
|
| Are you worried if you give him excessive screen time he won't
| be able to focus on his studies or something? ;-)
|
| (Cute story, thanks for sharing.)
| bArray wrote:
| I think my bird already has a difficult time focussing, he
| acts like he has ADHD. He'll happily sit their doom scrolling
| watching birds.
|
| The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time
| he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little
| aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird
| videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
| indrora wrote:
| A friend of mine has a parrot and I asked what having one
| is like and he just sent me this video [0] and the comment
| "Either peaceful and quiet or like this, wall to wall, no
| in between."
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/T8C8iJm_2gc
| MisterTea wrote:
| > starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks
| you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a
| phone out.
|
| Its even psychologically addicting for birds.
| krisoft wrote:
| Or alternative interpretation: Parrots are highly social
| creatures who love hanging out and socialising with other
| birds. Even a relatively happy parrot who is kept with a
| few other birds to keep them company, and has access to
| rooms to fly can feel under-socialised and under-
| stimulated. (This is not a dig to the commenter in
| particular. Even if you are richer than a king, and have
| an aviary zoos would be jealous of probably your parrots
| are not getting as much stimulation as they would be
| getting in the wild.) As a substitute to the real
| socialisation it is craving it finds watching bird videos
| agreeable.
|
| Basically i wouldn't call a starving man begging for
| scraps "addicted". They just have an unfulfilled need.
| They found a way to fulfill that need (more or less) and
| they are pursuing what they found to work for them. This
| might be bothersome for the keepers of course, but it is
| not the bird who choose to become their captive pet.
|
| (I want to emphasise here that I assume that the
| commenter is a lovely, dedicated, bird-loving person who
| provides a large flock of friends to their parrots and
| all the enrichement they can think of and money can buy.
| This is not a comment on them doing anything wrong.
| Simply an observation that there are some parrots whose
| needs are neight impossible to fully meet in captivity.)
|
| If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting
| feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds
| when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that
| would be much more of a sign to me about the
| addictiveness of the videos.
| firefax wrote:
| >The other concern is that when he gets too much screen
| time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a
| little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put
| bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
|
| Do you lock him up when this happens? I care for a bird, if
| it acts out when we let it roam, we lock it up the next day
| and it has quickly learned to enjoy it's limited freedom.
| NoToP wrote:
| Every generation of parrots just parrots what the last
| generation of parrots said about them.
| klik99 wrote:
| Parrot parents parrot their parents
| nick__m wrote:
| The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will
| steal it when he can.
|
| Most "seed eating" bird are opportunistic carnivore. Even the
| hummingbird with it's extra specialized beak supplements his
| diets with small insects!
|
| Oh and my 12yo bourk's parakeet really like chicken and madly
| love poutine. Its so funny seeing her taking a bite of French
| fries followed by a bite of cheese.
| margalabargala wrote:
| This is not limited to birds.
|
| Deer, horses, etc will do the same to small mammals and
| birds.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Nice, he is developing big brain
| deadbabe wrote:
| Crows are pretty smart, I befriended one after offering it
| cashews daily as I would sit in my patio working on my laptop.
| Now he pecks on my keyboard to generate code with AI to resolve
| simple Jira tickets.
| imglorp wrote:
| It wouldn't be hard to set up a service like this experiment so
| birds can socialize whenever they wanted.
|
| > They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on
| the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird
|
| And I really hate to bring AI into it, but "bird chat bot"
| doesn't seem too hard to train on a bunch of behaviors for live
| interaction. It could offer a palette of avatars.
| peterleiser wrote:
| In the past I had parakeets and lovebirds. I think the app is
| great, but my first (joking) reaction was "Now let's setup a
| control group by putting the tablet in selfie-mode to simulate
| a mirror".
| NoToP wrote:
| "Is this really a bird I'm communicating with or is it just a
| statistical parrot?"
| mncharity wrote:
| > for other parrot owners [...] not be wise to [...] Zoom [...]
| handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their
| birds' behavior--at the first sign of fear, aggression,
| disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls. [...] offer an
| appropriate level of support to empower their parrots but also
| help them avoid any negative experiences
|
| So to scale, hmm. Visual sentiment analysis of parrots. Parrot-
| accessibility. And... some kind of chaperone role... Is there a
| name for UX design which prioritizes non-negativity of
| experience over task completion and not leaving? Note that
| parrot-centered design may have unfamiliar properties, like
| say, stronger association with the physical location of the
| device, which say might then require a second device elsewhere
| to emulate a hypothetical "I'm avoiding you and going away to
| hang with friends" flock UX.
| Zobat wrote:
| Slightly off topic but somewhat related I've heard of a person
| (Richard Campbell, can be heard on the podcasts "Dot Net Rocks"
| or "Run as radio") who taught his parrot to use his voice to
| control the light at it's cage. The surprising result was that it
| became obvious that it wanted to go to bed earlier than they
| thought. It turned off the lights much earlier than the timer had
| before it gained control and would shut it off again directly if
| a human turned in on again.
| teddyh wrote:
| Maybe they can take over twitter.com, now that it's unused.
| cies wrote:
| It proves that keeping animals in cages hurts them badly.
| mncharity wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35664219 (215
| comments); https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38493299 (16
| comments)
| mncharity wrote:
| Fwiw, this[1] turned up when teasing AIs with "what is the latest
| news in visual sentiment analysis for parrots?".
|
| [1] _Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial
| update_ 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877086/
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Video did not strike me as convincing.
| TZubiri wrote:
| TZ: "How many types of eye cones do birds like parrots have, what
| are their colors?" CGPT: "...birds do have an RGB system that's
| roughly analogous to ours..."
|
| So this works with parrots, unlike dogs who have two color cones
| and wouldn't see very well on the screen.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/681a8524-59e4-800f-8bff-a673910c07...
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