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The observations made at Facebook are the latest in a long line
of similar cases. In each instance, an AI being monitored by
humans has diverged from its training in English to develop its
own language. The resulting phrases appear to be nonsensical
gibberish to humans but contain semantic meaning when
interpreted by AI "agents."
Negotiating in a new language
As
Fast Co. Design reports, Facebook's researchers recently
noticed its new AI had given up on English. The advanced system
is
capable of negotiating with other AI agents so it can come
to conclusions on how to proceed. The agents began to
communicate using phrases that seem unintelligible at first but
actually represent the task at hand.
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In one exchange illustrated by the company, the two negotiating
bots, named Bob and Alice, used their own language to complete
their exchange. Bob started by saying "I can i i everything
else," to which Alice responded "balls have zero to me to me to
me…" The rest of the conversation was formed from variations of
these sentences.
While it appears to be nonsense, the repetition of phrases like
"i" and "to me" reflect how the AI operates. The researchers
believe it shows the two bots working out how many of each item
they should take. Bob's later statements, such as "i i can i i i
everything else," indicate how it was using language to offer
more items to Alice. When interpreted like this, the phrases
appear more logical than comparable English phrases like "I'll
have three and you have everything else."
English lacks a "reward"
The AI apparently realised that the rich expression of English
phrases wasn’t required for the scenario. Modern AIs operate on
a "reward" principle where they expect following a sudden course
of action to give them a "benefit." In this instance, there was
no reward for continuing to use English, so they built a more
efficient solution instead.
"Agents will drift off from understandable language and invent
code-words for themselves,"
Fast Co. Design reports Facebook AI researcher 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."
AI developers at other companies have observed a similar use of
"shorthands" to simplify communication. At OpenAI, the
artificial intelligence lab founded by Elon Musk, an experiment
succeeded in letting AI bots learn their own languages.
AI language translates human ones
In a separate case, Google recently improved its Translate
service
by adding a neural network. The system is now capable of
translating much more efficiently, including between language
pairs that it hasn’t been explicitly taught. The success rate of
the network surprised Google's team. Its researchers
found the AI had silently written its own language that's
tailored specifically to the task of translating sentences.
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If AI-invented languages become widespread, they could pose a
problem when developing and adopting neural networks. There's
not yet enough evidence to determine whether they present a
threat that could enable machines to overrule their operators.
They do make AI development more difficult though as humans
cannot understand the overwhelmingly logical nature of the
languages. While they appear nonsensical, the results observed
by teams such as Google Translate indicate they actually
represent the most efficient solution to major problems.