"To be sure, because they don’t have real signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, the researchers had to rely on simulated signals to train their models. The researchers note that this could lead to the AI system learning artifacts that aren’t there.

Still, Cherry Ng, one of the paper’s co-authors, points out the team has a good idea of what to look for.

“A classic example of human-generated technology from space that we have detected is the Voyager,” said Ng, who studies fast radio bursts and pulsars, and is currently affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known as CNRS.

“Peter’s machine learning algorithm is able to generate these signals that the aliens may or may not have sent,” she said."