How to approach an unknown language in the ocean? Here’s one of the first cases of AI interpretability leading to a scientific discovery -- in whales. We built an artificial baby model that learns language directly from raw sound and trained it to imitate whale speech. Then we looked inside. Our interpretability method recovered the properties biologists already thought were meaningful and pointed out those that had not been considered before. This was the initial clue that eventually led to the discovery of vowels in sperm whales. Understanding AI and reframing language as informative imagitation can help us step outside our human biases and discover new realities about the natural world. Published in Royal Society Open Science.