That’s it folks, kiss you families goodbye, it’s all over. AI is inventing languages we can’t understand and we’re all doomed.
Ok, maybe that’s a tad hyperbolic, but it’s still fucking terrifying no matter how you choose to slice it. Here’s a conversation that happened between two separate pieces of AI:
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.”
Now, to you and I, that means absolutely fucking nothing. It’s nonsense. But for the AI, it’s the most efficient way of reaching their goal – to get the best deal possible.
Essentially, researchers developed two AI agents within Facebook and taught them to negotiate over a bunch of items. While they started out using plain english, the researches forgot to program them to stay within the realms of understandable language, meaning they were free to communicate in any way they liked.
It started out as normal english, but slowly evolved into something that no one can understand. They taught themselves how to communicate more effectively with each other and we humans can’t figure it out.
… Go get dad’s gun.
“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” said Dhruv Batra, a Georgia Tech researcher currently at Facebook AI Research. “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves.”
Batra compares the phenomenon to humans creating situation-specific shorthand like they do in the military or even gaming.
Should we be allowing AI to speak to each other in a way that we can’t comprehend? Not only that, do we allow them to continually adapt the way they communicate faster than we could ever keep up?
There’s two sides to the argument. The first is that it could benefit us moving forward. If we let machines figure out the best way to talk to each other, they could become far more efficient at exchanging information, like the Internet of Things on steroids.
The other argument is, well, what if they’re talking about us? That’s some Skynet level shit, man.
Either way, it’s wild stuff, folks.
Source: Fast Code Design.
Photo: Terminator.
