Facebook AI Goes Off the Rails

Two AI bots Facebook created quickly developed their own method of communication, leaving the English they had been trained to use in the dust. Instead, like a couple of pre-teens, they developed their own preferred language.

What Facebook developers found most disconcerting was that they could not follow what the bots were saying to each other. Bob, one bot, said, "I can i i everything else," to Alice, the second bot, replied, "Balls have zero to me to me to me..." It is believed that the repeated words represented numbers. Apparently, the bots were programmed to operate based on a reward system and they determined that there was no benefit to using English.

"There was no reward to sticking to English language," Dhruv Batra, a research scientist from Georgia Tech who was at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). "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."

Whether AI shorthand would allow robots to completely bypass all programming remains to be seen. It may simply allow the machines to operate more efficiently.

Renowned science and tech experts from Stephen Hawking to Bill Gates have voiced concerns about the future of AI and its consequences. Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg have discussed AI, to the frustration of Musk, who publicly tweeted only a couple of days before Facebook’s AI meltdown,"I've talked to Mark about this (AI). His understanding of the subject is limited."