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Every time I see news about AI taking to animals, I want to ask: why do they assume animals have universal languages across an entire population?

For human, language is a cultural thing. We have so many variations. I often see AI that talks to pets. But usually a pet grows up in isolation to other peers, can it learn their language at all, or they just develop some local dialect that is only used within the household?

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The Arstechnica article touches on this briefly:

While DolphinGemma has been trained on Atlantic spotted dolphin sounds, Google suggests it should be feasible to fine-tune it for other cetacean species.

I haven't read the paper below, but here's a reference that seems relevant to your question:

Luís, A.R., May-Collado, L.J., Rako-Gospić, N. et al. Vocal universals and geographic variations in the acoustic repertoire of the common bottlenose dolphin. Sci Rep 11, 11847 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-90710-9

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