You know that joke about monkeys on typewriters?

[MsAmerica]

The idea that if you set enough monkeys with typewriters, eventually, by the laws of randomness, they'd produce Shakespeare?

Well, now there's A.I.

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In This Costa Rican Forest, Monkeys Come Face-to-Face With A.I.
CapuchinAI, a portable testing station equipped with a touch screen and facial recognition software, could help scientists study primate intelligence in the wild.
By Emily Anthes

One day last summer, a curious white-faced capuchin encountered a strange contraption in the forest. There, in the middle of the Taboga Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, sat a 15-inch touch screen, mounted in a wooden frame. As the monkey, an alpha male named Papi, began investigating — poking the device here, prodding it there — his fingers landed on the screen. Suddenly, a piece of dried banana dropped into a tray below the frame.

Before long, Papi learned the basic rules of the device: touch the screen, get a dried banana slice. He also provided proof of concept for CapuchinAI, a new device designed to assess the cognitive abilities of monkeys in the wild. The testing apparatus, which the researchers described in a new paper, used A.I.-powered facial recognition software to detect capuchins in real time and record their responses to a simple learning task.

The scientists hope that more sophisticated versions of the device, which they will begin testing in the coming weeks, will shed new light on primate evolution and intelligence, and answer questions that would be impossible to study in a lab, such as how a monkey’s smarts affect its success and survival.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/science/costa-rica-monkeys-ai.html

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AI isn’t just being forced on us. Even forest monkeys are now a test audience in the name of science
Researchers from Emory University have built an AI-powered touchscreen that rewards wild capuchin monkeys with banana slices, helping them study how they think, learn, and solve problems in their natural habitat.
By Pranob Mehrotra

You didn’t ask for an AI summary of your inbox or a chatbot in your camera app, but you got it anyway. The same thing is happening to the monkeys of Costa Rica’s Taboga Forest Reserve...

Even monkeys can’t escape AI now.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-isnt-just-being-forced-on-us-even-forest-monkeys-are-now-a-test-audience-in-the-name-of-science/

This sounds awful! Ah least the monkeys aren't in a laboratory i guess, but i wish we could just leave them alone. We know that are clever already.

The AI is only for facial recognition. I think this is just daft people just tagging AI onto everything. Vision detection systems have been about for decades. That these scientists are using an " AI" app connected to their camera feed is likely because that is what the system designer patched on. Instead of having to get a programmer in who can set up older systems. That is all, IMO.

Re ethics. I think that is really just the feeding wild animals part. And on that, so long as they are not changing the behavior of the group, so as to create dependency. I don't see an issue.

This is really no different to someone setting up a squirrel assault course in a garden.

It's just that the Journalist has decided to go with the AI angle.

The study itself looks interesting I reckon.

Add to the AI point that, most of the AI-madness, is really madness for "cloud LLM" - In other words, distant chat tools online. Embedding money face-recognition in a camera isn't the same sort of AI work at all, and totally disconnected from the "AI everytthing" that makes us ~panic and rant~ so fascinated every time.

I think it's about time we did the sensible thing and pulled the plug before AI works out a way of preventing us from switching it off.

Yup. I doubt this is a case of "AI in the jungle". More likely "AI connected". As in AI was used somewhere in the design of the thing.

For example. I do not use AI. And at the moment I am working on a design project using a pre AI CAD system. But technically, if I use a search engine to look something up, and that search engine uses AI, then there is an AI input.

There are just so many people who are keen to insert AI into anything, and a great many of them are stretching the "definition". They want to insert the buzzword into their project, for whatever reason.

BIG furor right now due to Jacob Coxon and his warning.

Ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warns AI could grow "smart enough to kill us"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-researcher-jacob-coxon-ai-warning/

The idea that if you set enough monkeys with typewriters, eventually, by the laws of randomness, they'd produce Shakespeare?

It's an infinite number of monkeys typing for infinity
A comment/illustration of infinity, not randomness (which is just as interesting as infinity but in a different way)

sorry
as you were
A Pedant

Yes, I saw that. It's about time somebody stood up and said something.

Computers taking over has worried me for a very long time, ever since I watched a film many years ago called 'Colossus: the Forbin Project'.

Worth watching.

You don't need AI to reward a monkey for touching a screen. You don't even need a computer, it could easily be done mechanically. The AI will just be to recognise and track individual monkeys.

Of all the dangerous or immoral AI use cases, I don't think this is one of them.

There seems to more and more 'monkey business' going on these days with AI.

As this is the wildlife topic...

I think this is a good use of facial recognition as they can aim the learning at the level of that specific monkey and teach them to do more complicated things. Push button to get food is just old fashioned Pavlov.