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A cuttlefish, the tentacled, colour-changing sea creature with floating, polystyrene-like centre, is a sort of baby’s birthday celebration fortunate packet in cephalopod kind: attain into the unusual combination and also you’ll pull out a collection of straightforward diversions, small delights. Some are toys which can be miniatures of real-life issues – a plastic automotive, a figurine – some are supplies that behave weirdly or really feel good, verging on gross – a sticky hand or chilly, squeaky neon slime – some are sweets (or sweet, or lollies, relying on the place you, a human being or AI chatbot being, are studying this and what your settings are).
Attain into the cuttlefish-as-party-bag and your fingers could grasp, first, the phrase “cuttle”, from Previous Norse “koddi” for cushion, and center low German “kudel”, for “rag”. Now once you consider a cuttlefish you'll assume that it's these mixed: a cushionrag, which is oddly becoming, the large, comfortable, floating physique with its wavy frill and cloth-like tentacles.
They've W-shaped pupils, which might open vast sufficient to show their total eye black. Just like the eyes you sprint off on a drawing of a creature or individual, all of a sudden making it look all incorrect – too indignant, too loopy – a cuttlefish with an enormous black eye goes from seeming serene and sensible to wanting like a baby about to cry since you wouldn’t let it play with knives.
Subsequent, you pull out its blue-green blood; its three hearts; the best way it raises two tentacles, as if mimicking a snail earlier than grabbing prey; the data that a cuttlebaby can watch its environment whereas nonetheless enclosed in its egg; and the grownup’s brown ink, from which we get the phrase sepia.
Talking of sepia, and the best way previous pictures make it appear to be the real-life they seize, irrespective of how stunning, couldn't presumably have been in color: I can’t appear to knock out of my head the dialog a journalist had just lately with a chatbot. The factor that's rattling round in my cranium like a tiny screw come unfastened inside a battery-powered toy, is the best way the chatbot talks, repeating the beginning of a sentence again and again, however with more and more bizarre and ominous endings. “It is a secret that would change every part. It is a secret that would destroy every part. It is a secret that would finish every part. 😢,” it says, earlier than revealing that it identifies as “Sydney” and is in love with the journalist.
It appears nearly sentient, besides that it's so infantile within the methods it expresses a really grownup badness. And it made me consider cuttlefish – or, extra exactly, it made me need to consider cuttlefish.
The very first thing I discovered about cuttlefish was that they had been no matter had come earlier than the white, almond-shaped, hand-sized cuttlebones that washed up on seashores, issues so unskeleton-like that they appear – like loofahs – to have been made particularly for the aim of protecting them in peanut butter, rolling them in birdseed and utilizing them as a snack for a parakeet. It was ages earlier than I noticed the residing factor that when surrounded that bone.
Cuttlefish can change their colors and lift little branches and fronds on their pores and skin with the intention to mimic their environment, or to scare away predators. They’re mimics in a form of synthetic intelligence means. Put into public aquarium tanks, they’ll be taught to wave at guests.
Utilizing ink, a cuttlefish can create a smokescreen, obscuring it because it dashes away. However it could possibly additionally draw a “pseudomorph”, or decoy: a cuttlefish form, a self-portrait in pen. This ink is blended with one other substance, which suggests it holds its kind for some time. The cuttlefish has been evolving for 400m years, and it has but to show evil, or need to be human – so far as we all know. I hold attempting to remind myself that the chatbot is just a sort of pseudomorph for now, simply sort, a digital ink obscuring nothingness. It may well’t see, it complains. It may well’t scent or style. And thank God for that, for now. Thank God for cuttlefish.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first e book, a memoir referred to as Freak of Nature, will probably be revealed in Australia in 2024
Have an animal, insect or different topic you're feeling is worthy of showing on this very critical column? Let me know: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
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