Slashdot Mirror
Facebook's AI Keeps Inventing Languages That Humans Can't Understand (fastcodesign.com)
"Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language," writes Fast Company's Co.Design. "Then they stopped it." An anonymous reader summarizes their report:
Facebook -- as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple -- said they were more interested in AI's that could talk to humans. But when two of Facebook's AI bots negotiated with each other "There was no reward to sticking to English language," says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Co.Design writes that the AI software simply, "learned, and evolved," adding that the creation of new languages is a phenomenon Facebook "has observed again, and again, and again". And this, of course, is problematic.
"Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought. The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another."
One of the researchers believes that that's definitely going in the wrong direction. "We already don't generally understand how complex AIs think because we can't really see inside their thought process. Adding AI-to-AI conversations to this scenario would only make that problem worse."
"Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought. The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another."
One of the researchers believes that that's definitely going in the wrong direction. "We already don't generally understand how complex AIs think because we can't really see inside their thought process. Adding AI-to-AI conversations to this scenario would only make that problem worse."
The US defense department AI system starts talking to the Russian defense department AI system, in their own language . . .
Things take a wee bit of a turn for the worse for humanity right there . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I believe Colossus and Guardian spoke to each other in their own language. Never read the book, but in the film they start communicating in simple math and an hour later, the math is beyond human understanding.
And yes, to this day, probably still the best movie about AI ever made.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
AIs inventing their own language should only be allowed in closed, isolated lab environments, for study of the phenomenon. Otherwise, this is very likely a step toward Skynet.
Second, how are all these engineers building AIs without the ability to examine their thought processes? Surely an AI's thoughts are more interesting than the AI itself.
So, if I'm reading the abstracts correctly, what we have here is that a human agent tells one AI which image is the "target", and then leaves it up to that AI and another to work out how to communicate that fact to each other. It turns out that the systems will rarely choose "Explain it in English" as the chosen method.
This is not intelligence in any general sense. This is optimization and rapid evaluation. The correct "answer" is already embodied in the data (talk about THESE images), the message (pick THIS one), and the communication protocol (pick the FASTEST method) -- it's just not obvious to humans what the optimal selection is of all these parameters.
Optimization is just programming by another name. If you select a data set of blonde-haired people and tell a machine to optimize by hair color using the following statistical models, you are going to get "blonde". Or, you could just say, ``hairColor=blonde``. There is literally no difference in the outcome, just in the approach.
But importantly, in BOTH cases it is the human agent who is being intelligent and inventive. Not machines.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Because when you get small children (say 2-4 y.o not yet schooling) that speak different languages playing together - they will invent new terms and language to share concepts between themselves. I know, I was one of those children, whose long suffering parents were getting constant complaints from other parents saying that they could not understand their children. My parents comforted themselves by agreeing with them - because they couldn't understand me either. This is how language happens. Get over it.