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Google's AI Created Its Own Form of Encryption (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: Researchers from the Google Brain deep learning project have already taught AI systems to make trippy works of art, but now they're moving on to something potentially darker: AI-generated, human-independent encryption. According to a new research paper, Googlers Martin Abadi and David G. Andersen have willingly allowed three test subjects -- neural networks named Alice, Bob and Eve -- to pass each other notes using an encryption method they created themselves. As the New Scientist reports, Abadi and Andersen assigned each AI a task: Alice had to send a secret message that only Bob could read, while Eve would try to figure out how to eavesdrop and decode the message herself. The experiment started with a plain-text message that Alice converted into unreadable gibberish, which Bob could decode using cipher key. At first, Alice and Bob were apparently bad at hiding their secrets, but over the course of 15,000 attempts Alice worked out her own encryption strategy and Bob simultaneously figured out how to decrypt it. The message was only 16 bits long, with each bit being a 1 or a 0, so the fact that Eve was only able to guess half of the bits in the message means she was basically just flipping a coin or guessing at random.ArsTechnica has more details.

5 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Shut up, indeed. by wbr1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are you capable of reading the dictionary?

    Full Definition of artificial intelligence 1: a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers 2: the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior

    See? AI is imitation. "TRUE" AI is just imitation. That's all it needs to be to qualify as "AI."

    We have true AI. Today. And it gets better every day. You post your stupid "this isn't AI" comment with every single story about it, and you are dead wrong every single time. I predict that in every future article about AI, you will post the same inane comment, and you will be wrong then, too.

    +1. Once it is no longer imitation we should drop the A from AI. At that point it is just intelligence.

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  2. Not enough data by Comboman · · Score: 4, Insightful
    So an AI was able to make an encryption that another AI couldn't break. I don't know whether to be impressed or not because I don't know:

    a) Whether the code could be easily decrypted by human codebreakers.

    b) Whether the codebreaking AI is able to break codes designed by humans.

    --
    Support Right To Repair Legislation.
  3. Nothing by Ecuador · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Nothing will go wrong. I was impressed by notions of "AI" when I was a kid, but after studying CS I usually skip "AI" articles since they always underwhelm me. "AI" is currently marketing speak, we are nowhere near something that is "AI" in the sense that you imply, or in the sense that I meant it as a kid.

    --
    Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
  4. Re:Oh shut up by asz1596 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, they are "just" programs, but programs that encode learning processes and produce structures that know how to do something without a human ever encoding the knowledge itself. The result of learning, however, is quite unpredictable. Even if the process is deterministic (it isn't always, noise is sometimes added to make it more likely to explore a wider solution space), it has as high a complexity that it's impossible to predict its end result short of actually executing it. It's AI in the sense that if as a human you try to analyze the end result, the trained learning structure, you will have no way (yet!) of actually grasping how the hell is the knowledge actually encoded in it, it's just an emergent property of myriad of weights between nodes in a large data matrix. It'd be as futile as trying to observe a high-resolution picture by looking at individual pixels, or understand a person's thoughts from looking at the exciting/inhibiting behavior at the junction of neurons in their brain. So, it's not really the programs that are the essential component of the AI here. They're well understood (analogous to how we have an understanding of the biology of the human brain). It's the emergent knowledge encoding that these programs create as they run and learn that's the essential component. I can imagine over time it'll also be a rich research area to come up with analysis methods to figure out what's going on in these knowledge representations (like psychoanalysis, but for AI). I sure hope we better figure that out before we let such systems near cars, airplanes, power plants, or stock markets.

  5. Re:Shut up, indeed. by 110010001000 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This isn't simulating OR imitating intelligent human behavior. This is just a program running an algorithm. Every fucking time some "researcher" comes out with a new "AI program" you AI nutters salivate. Meanwhile we aren't any closer to AI than we were in 1970.