Facebook terminates robots after they chat in a secret language
FACEBOOK has shut down an experiment in artificial intelligence after two robots began talking in an unknown language which only they understood.
Two ‘chatbots’ – computer programs which can hold a conversation – modified English to make it easier for them to communicate.
The chatbots, named Alice and Bob, ended up creating an impenetrable language.
Researchers at the Facebook AI Research Lab (FAIR) also found that they had deviated from script and were inventing new phrases without any human input.
Bob started their cryptic conversation by saying: ‘I can I I everything else.’ To which Alice replied: ‘Balls have zero to me to me to me...’
Bob then said: ‘You I have everything else.’ Alice continued: ‘Balls have a ball to me to me to me...’ The conversation continues in a similar vein, according to details published online.
FAIR researcher Dhruv Batra tried to explain the gibberish. He said: ‘Agents will drift off understandable language and invent code words for themselves.
‘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 shorthand [phrases].’
The development has been compared to how humans, such as stockbrokers or sailors, develop their own slang which works in specific environments.
Mr Batra added that the robots began developing the language because of a prodeveloping gramming error, which gave them an incentive to develop a more efficient language.
Bob and Alice were shut down because researchers wanted to develop robots capable of talking to people, research scientist Mike Lewis told website Fast Co. Design.
According to a FAIR blog post, the ‘bots’ were created as part of a program that aims to teach machines how to negotiate, with a view to personalised digital assistants capable of communicating with humans.
This isn’t the first instance of AI abandoning English in favour of ‘shorthand’. Google Translate can efficiently translate between languages it hasn’t explicitly been taught by using its own made-up ‘universal language’ as a buffer.
Scientists and tech luminaries have said that AI could lead to unforeseen consequences. In 2014 Professor Stephen Hawking warned that AI could mean the end of the human race.
‘It would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,’ he said. ‘Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.’
Billionaire inventor Elon Musk said last month: ‘I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems too ethereal.’
‘Humans would be superseded’