Facebook’s AI bots are communicating in a language we don’t understand

*Insert Terminator analogy here*. Researchers at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) have stopped AI from chatting in what appears to be a nonsensical language. Last month, the FAIR team was working on a project which teaches AI bots to negotiate. Why negotiation? According to Facebook, negotiating requires “complex communication and reasoning skills, which are attributes not inherently found in computers.” So far so good. During the research, FAIR let the AI use “reinforcement learning” – iterative improvement based on past experience – in two separate experiments. In the first, the researchers made the AI conform to language that imitated human communication, in this case, English. But in the second, the researchers allowed the AI to diverge from English. “There was no reward to sticking to English language,” FAIR researcher Dhruv Batra told Fast Co Design. “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent code words for themselves…“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.” So what did this new AI language look like? Here is a taster: Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”Alice: “Balls have…


Link to Full Article: Facebook’s AI bots are communicating in a language we don’t understand

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