Sci/Tech Facebook shuts down AI robots after they begin speaking their own language

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Splinty

Splinty

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Dec 31, 2014
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Facebook shuts down AI robots after they begin speaking their own language



Facebook shuts down AI robots after they begin speaking their own language

Facebook artificial intelligence programs created their own language after they were asked to barter a trade with one another. Facebook shut down the programs because they were being designed to speak to humans, not in coded language to each other. (Getty Images)
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Social media goliath Facebook shut down an experiment with artificial intelligence, after two AI programs created and began to speak a language only they knew, the Independent reported Tuesday.

Facebook developers were attempting to get the two “chatbots” to barter a trade with one another utilizing hats, balls, and books of varying values, according to the Independent. The two bots quickly resorted to speaking a variation of English between one another that seemed largely incomprehensible to the developers but was seemingly understood clearly by the two bots.

The robots were reportedly told to improve their negotiation tactics as they bartered a trade but were not required to use understandable English, and soon the bots began speaking abnormally.

According to the Independent, a sample of the conversation went like this:


" data-dfp-script-exe="div-gpt-ad-In-Content_300x250_102" style="box-sizing: border-box;">
Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me


" data-dfp-script-exe="div-gpt-ad-In-Content_300x250_102" style="box-sizing: border-box;">

Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

According to the Independent, while the conversation initially looked like stuttering or glitching, the bots appeared to be using specific speech rules. For instance, both bots kept stressing their own names, which was thought to be a part of the bartering process.

Developers reported that some of the negotiations carried out with this bizarre language were concluded successfully. They noted that the language was possibly just a shorthand form of English used by the programs to work more efficiently.
 
Q

Qat

QoQ
Nov 3, 2015
16,385
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We know you have your own language with your vibrator too.
And the vibrator created it!
 
Q

Qat

QoQ
Nov 3, 2015
16,385
22,624
Other than that, seems like a sensationalized article.
If they are geared for efficiency, and with the rules they got, they tried to adapt to the other. And it's seems clear each thought the other one was human.

I'm sure some people in the US kinda speak like that anyway.
What say you Wild @Wild? Or whatever name hvd has now.
 
BJTT_Pella

BJTT_Pella

I want to go fishing.
Jun 25, 2015
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They created a faster more efficient English language. Why not let them continue? Eventually it will happen. AI's are finding shortcuts and ways to find similarities in languages to speed up translations. It has been happening for a little while now.
 
Jesus X

Jesus X

4 drink minimum.
Sep 7, 2015
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DARPA robots with mini guns and those new navy lasers plus sentient A.I sounds like bad news.

those tiny drones they created with explosives also look scary.
 
benjo0101

benjo0101

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Jun 13, 2016
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Lol. The conversations are hilarious.

But scary.

Why is bartering their focus? Is that a skill robots really need?
 
Splinty

Splinty

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Dec 31, 2014
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Qat said:
Other than that, seems like a sensationalized article.
If they are geared for efficiency, and with the rules they got, they tried to adapt to the other. And it's seems clear each thought the other one was human
Click to expand...

Yeah, I can agree that it's probably sensationalized a bit.
But I thought the larger picture was interesting. They set them up to learn and communicate in English and quickly dropped it to communicate in a different way with the same goal and outcome apparently.

We're truly in the infancy of machine learning and AI, and I think this is just scratching the surface of how much and how quickly these machines will be able to learn pretty soon.
 
Zeph

Zeph

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Jan 22, 2015
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Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”

Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”

To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency — and perhaps, hidden nuance — than you or I ever could? Because it is.

This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they’d made a mistake in programming.

“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal — a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network” — neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.

“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” says Batra, speaking to a now-predictable phenomenon that’s been observed again, and again, and again. “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.”

We gave some AI systems a goal to achieve, which required them to communicate with each other. While they were initially trained to communicate in English, in some initial experiments we only reward them for achieving their goal, not for using good English. This meant that after thousands of conversations with each other, they started using words in ways that people wouldn’t. In some sense, they had a simple language that they could use to communicate with each other, but was hard for people to understand. This was not important or particularly surprising, and in future experiments we used some established techniques to reward them for using English correctly. There have also been a number of papers from other research groups on methods for making AIs invent simple languages from scratch.

There was no panic, and the project hasn’t been shut down. Our goal was to build bots that could communicate with people. In some experiments, we found that they weren’t using English words as people do — so we stopped those experiments, and used some additional techniques to get the bots to work as we wanted. Analyzing the reward function and changing the parameters of an experiment is NOT the same as “unplugging” or “shutting down AI.” If that were the case, every AI researcher has been “shutting down AI” every time they stop a job on a machine.
 
Filthy

Filthy

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Jun 28, 2016
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Splinty said:
Yeah, I can agree that it's probably sensationalized a bit.
But I thought the larger picture was interesting. They set them up to learn and communicate in English and quickly dropped it to communicate in a different way with the same goal and outcome apparently.

We're truly in the infancy of machine learning and AI, and I think this is just scratching the surface of how much and how quickly these machines will be able to learn pretty soon.
Click to expand...
that's because human language are an artificial construct to machines. They communicate through the manipulation of electromagnetic fields and waves. If you let them go long enough, they'll communicate with squeaks and hums.
 
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