Facebook researchers shut down AI that invented its own language

Facebook researchers recently shut down an AI they invented as their new system had given up on English and started following another language, which would seem gibberish to them but made perfect sense to the AI agents.

During one exchange, two bots named Bob and Alice abandoned English grammar rules and started communicating using the made up language. Bob kicked things off by saying, "I can i i everything else," which prompted Alice to respond, "balls have zero to me to me to me..." The conversation went on in that manner. This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. 

Dhruv Batra, a research scientist from Georgia Tech who was at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), told Fast Co. Design, “There was no reward to sticking to English language. Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords 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.”

These agents began to communicate using phrases that seem unintelligible at first, but actually represent the task at hand. While it appears to be nonsense, the repetitions of phrases like "i" and "to me" reflect how the AI actually operates. Researchers realized that they cannot truly understand the language created by AI. Eventually, the company decided that it wanted its bots to communicate in English, as the end result was for it to communicate with people.