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. According to a New York Times report, researchers have handed them a touchscreen system that uses artificial intelligence to study how wild capuchins think and learn without ever taking them out of their natural habitat.
Even monkeys can’t escape AI now
Unlike the AI features popping up across our apps, this one actually has a scientific purpose. The device, called CapuchinAI, is a portable testing station built by Emory University researchers. It combines a touchscreen, a webcam, and a 3D-printed food dispenser inside a wooden frame. Facial recognition software trained on images of Taboga’s resident capuchins identifies an approaching monkey and presents a simple challenge: touch the screen to earn a piece of dried banana.
According to the study, the researchers waited two days before any capuchin approached the device. On the third day, an alpha male the researchers named Papi showed up, and before long he learned the pattern. Eventually, ten of the sixteen capuchins who interacted with the station figured out the task, and at least eight remembered how it worked during later sessions.
Dr. Marcela Benítez, a primatologist at Emory University, said the goal is to observe how primates solve problems under the same pressures they experience in the wild, something a lab setting can’t replicate.
The AI upgrade is already on the way
This summer, the team plans to test an upgraded model that identifies individual capuchins instead of simply recognizing the species. The new system will also run tests for impulse control and cognitive flexibility, tracking each monkey’s progress the way a game tracks a player’s stats. It’s a more interactive step up from the facial recognition software previously used to identify individual chimpanzees in the wild, since CapuchinAI pairs recognition with a live reward loop.
Most of us know AI as the thing that keeps appearing on our phones, browsers, and inboxes, whether we want it or not. Now it’s showing up in the Costa Rican rainforest too. The difference here is that these new users are wild capuchins tapping a screen for banana slices, all in the name of science.