Latest news about Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies. Your daily crypto news habit.
Back in June, we ran a story on howĀ Facebook had created chat bots capable of negotiatingĀ and, inadvertently, also taught them how to lie. The bots lied by learning from real human conversations and subsequently faking interest in one item to add perceived value. Now, these Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have beenĀ shut down for creating a language of their own in order to communicate more efficiently.
The Bots That Gave up on English
In aĀ negotiating experiment, FacebookāsĀ AI bots were shown two books, one hat, and three balls. Each agent was assignedĀ a different value that represented how much it cared about a specific item, and the goal was to maximize profit by negotiating with the other bots.
Now, according to Fast Co. Design, Facebookās negotiating AI apparently decided that the English language was not efficient enough for its negotiations and decided to create its own language to get rid of its inconsistencies.
The resulting language looks like the gibberish one would expect out of AI built by amateurs, but upon further inspection, it was decidedĀ that despite being seemingly unintelligible to humans, it madeĀ perfect sense to AI agents. Indeed, it allowed them to communicate with one another without researchers knowing what was going on.
An exchange between two AI agents, Bob and Alice, went like this: Bob stated, āI can i i everything elseā, and Alice cameĀ back atĀ him with, āballs have zero to me to me to me to meā¦ā The conversation continued from thereĀ with variations of these two sentences.
According to researchers, repeating phrases like āiā and āto meā reflect how AI operates. The two bots wereĀ working out how many of each item each oneĀ should take. Bobās words āi i everything elseā showed that he was offering Alice more items. Apparently, English use was not rewarding for AIs in this scenario, and they utilizedĀ a more efficient solution given theĀ way in which they operate.
Per Facebook AI researcher Dhruv Batra:
āAgents will drift off from understandable language and invent code-words for themselves. Like if I say ātheā five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isnāt so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.ā
Facebook Will Stick to English-Speaking AI
Researchers noted that as there are no humans capable of understanding this type of language, theyāveĀ had to shut these agents down and stick to those that use English so they can stay in charge of what is going on.
After all, the goal of teaching bots to chat and negotiate is getting them to talk to humans, not to one another. If we are looking for the best restaurant in town, gibberish is not going to help us out.
In a similar case, Googleās AI managed to improve its translation service by learning language pairs it hadnātĀ been taught, seemingly by using its own internal language. For example, if anĀ agent had beenĀ taught English to French, and French to Italian, it could translate English to Italian.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of Bitcoin Insider. Every investment and trading move involves risk - this is especially true for cryptocurrencies given their volatility. We strongly advise our readers to conduct their own research when making a decision.