This is why we can’t have nice things. Did you ever have the feeling that people are talking behind your back, but you can’t quite make out what they’re saying? Imagine for a minute if instead of people, there were artificial intelligence (AI) bots plotting and scheming in the background — and to make matters worse, they’ve been communicating in their own language.
That’s exactly the dilemma that Facebook ran into when it found that its AI bots were communicating in a shorthand mutation of English. For example, Facebook provided the passage from two of its bots — Bob and Alice — while communicating with each other:
That’s exactly the dilemma that Facebook ran into when it found that its AI bots were communicating in a shorthand mutation of English. For example, Facebook provided the passage from two of its bots — Bob and Alice — while communicating with each other:
Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”Taken at face value, there’s really no way for humans to make sense of such verbiage. However, research scientist Dhruv Batra, from the Facebook AI Research (FAIR), says that just like humans often use “shortcuts” with the English language that is easily understood by other humans, AI can use similar methods to get their point across more efficiently. Why should computers be forced to work within the confines of the English language if they can communicate with each other faster using a seemingly [to them] better language?
Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg |
“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” says Batra. “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.”
“It’s definitely possible, it’s possible that [language] can be compressed, not just to save characters, but compressed to a form that it could express a sophisticated thought,” Batra added.
After being stymied by the bots’ penchant for using their own specially-crafted language, Facebook decided to crack the “digital whip” so to speak, forcing the AI to speak only in English so that humans could understand what they were up to at any given moment. After all, the last thing that we need is a Skynet uprising to threaten mankind.
It’s this sort of uncertainty that prompted Tony Stark Elon Musk to note that we should be very careful around AI, and be aware of its potential risks. "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon—it doesn't work out," said Musk at MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics Department's Centennial Symposium in 2014.