Elon Musk recently warned the world about artificial intelligence and the need for proactive regulation. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called Musk’s warnings “pretty irresponsible” and called the ‘naysayer’ negative. But researchers at Facebook recently had to shut down their artificial intelligence program after the AI agents invented their own language.
The conversation between the two bots changed to something along these lines:
Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”
Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
While this may seem gibberish to a mind trained in the English language, this is actually codewords invented by the bots. Similar to how humans have developed a unique dialect for essentially everything, the AI bots evolved their dialects for specific tasks to speak with other AI agents.
Fast Co. Design reported, according to visiting research scientist Dhruv Batra from Georgia Tech at the Facebook AI Research (FAIR,) the two bots competed to get the best deal but neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person. As the agents were competing in a “generative adversarial network” the bots diverged to rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences in an effort to develop efficient methods of communication. Explaining the bots new language, Dhruv Batra said,“Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”
Developing consumer grade ways for AI to talk with other humans is part of the research developers in companies like Facebook and Google are conducting, which is typically focused on English speech. According to reports, this is not the first time AI Bots diverged from their training in English to develop a new language and conversational system that seemed gibberish at first. The AI agents could disobey the rules of understandable language and compress the original tools provided to them by the researchers. This allowed them to communicate to such a degree that even single words or a single ‘token’ could represent more than its meaning in English.
In general, machines can converse using baseline building blocks such as human vocabulary, numbers or binary codes. These symbols or blocks become tokens when machines imbue the words with rich meanings, allowing them to exchange incredibly complex thoughts through the simplest of symbols. The Facebook bots were shut down because the researchers were looking to create agents who could interact with humans and not just other bots. The new language the AI bots created was a byproduct and a surprise. That being said, the need for proactive regulation is still up for discussion as there is not enough evidence to claim that these unforeseen AI divergences are a threat or could lead to robots taking over the world.
