The Talking Tree and How AI Can Give a Voice to the Voiceless

How can you get young people to reconnect with nature? Let them talk to a tree. That’s the creative premise behind a new campaign that features a 150-year-old horse chestnut tree in London's Morden Hill Park, which 'speaks' using “real-time sensory data from over 10 sensors measuring wind speed, soil moisture, humidity, and bioelectrical signals. This data feeds into an LLM that shapes the tree's personality and enables live conversations.”

While a novel concept, this also signals an interesting potential usage of AI and avatars of a sort to offer a voice to objects that previously lacked them. Instead of just focusing on AI clones from celebrities, what if we could use AI to generate marketing and advertising that anthropomorphizes things to add personality and make them approachable and memorable—just like a talking tree.