Artificial intelligence (AI) could be the key to increasing the efficiency and productivity of the seafood industry, while boosting its reputation at the same time.
Many seafood companies and regulatory bodies are already looking to AI to help either increase efficiency or improve sustainability. Seafood companies, including processing, fishing, and aquaculture companies, are all using AI in multiple ways, from identifying when a salmon in a net pen is sick to making sure trawling nets release unwanted species.
While the applications of AI are new, Chroma Ventures Principal Chris van der Kuyl said the technology they're based on has been around for a while.
“Let me let you in on a secret. Almost none of what you’re marveling at, from ChatGPT to DeepMind to incredible work on protein folding, is based on new science” van der Kuyl said while delivering the keynote address at the 2024 Responsible Seafood Summit in St. Andrews, Scotland.
Van der Kuyl is the chairman of 4J Studios – the developers of the console edition of the wildly popular video game Minecraft – and has decades of experience in the field of AI. When he studied the subject at university in 1987, the field was already well established.
The reason AI is beginning to take on new life is the advances in computing power that have come over the last several decades.
“Enormous resources in cloud computing meant people all over the world have access to almost limitless computing power at the click of a mouse,” van der Kuyl said.
As that power is becoming increasingly available, almost every industry is using it – including the seafood industry.
“The possibilities are boundless, limited only by our imagination. We’re merely scratching the surface of what’s possible,” van der Kuyl said.
Future aquaculture farms could be managed fully remotely from a central platform and be nearly fully automated, van der Kuyl suggested. Underwater robots could autonomously gather real-time data and conduct inspections without human input.
“We’ve already seen similar advanced terrestrial farms where drones assess soil and water quality to optimize practices,” van der Kuyl said. “With enough data, AI can forecast disease outbreaks well in advance by analyzing environmental conditions, fish health indicators, and regional trends.”
Following van der Kuyl’s keynote address, a separate panel of AI experts talked about another potential boon AI could offer the seafood industry: a reputational boost.
“People outside this room don’t quite understand that the sea is a source of food for many people in the world,” Sustainable Oceans Fund Advisor John Goodlad said.
To many people, the ocean is simply a marine reserve for biodiversity or a destination to visit on a holiday, he said.
“Of course, it should be all those things; I’m not saying it shouldn’t. But it’s also a huge source of food,” Goodlad said. “If we don’t farm and fish the oceans and produce 200 million tons of seafood every year, if we stop doing that, do we farm the land more intensively? Do we use more fertilizer and cut down more rainforest, since we have to feed 10 billion people by 2050?”
AI could be a way to improve transparency in wild-caught fisheries and in aquaculture, helping uninformed consumers get a better picture of the seafood industry's sustainability, he said.
“Lots of people out there – and it’s fueled by some radical NGOs – believe fish catching and fish farming is ultimately unsustainable,” Goodlad said. “That’s a terrible thing to say and a terrible thing to hear, but believe me, an increasing part of the global population believe that.”
Those sectors of people aren’t necessarily going to believe assertions from the seafood industry itself – but an external verification through AI could be the key.
“I think that’s a really important added benefit that can come from AI to the seafood industry,” he said.
Van der Kuyl added that for wild capture fisheries or aquaculture, AI can be used as a predictive tool to anticipate impacts of those activities on the environment and avoid any potential issues, which helps lend credibility to the seafood industry.
“If you’ve got poor systems and manual systems, and you just make mistakes out of human error, you suddenly end up on the front page of the newspapers for terrible fish welfare,” van der Kuyl.
AI can help avoid those mistakes and the media firestorm that can sometimes result while also providing new, highly accurate data, which in turn will benefit public perception and ultimately regulation.
“Governments will listen to every opinion, with no opinion being the right one, and make a decision based on what’s the popular opinion. We need to be way beyond that,” van der Kuyl. “We know we need to change popular opinion; I think these technologies can help us do that in a really quite simple way.”
