Sci-Fi becomes Reality: Facebook kills AI that invented its own language because English was slow

Stopping a Skynet scenario before it begins.

In Sci-Fi movies we always see how fast advances are made in artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies and then AI goes rogue and becomes danger for Humanity as machines rise up and turn against humans. Now all this Sci-Fi stuff we ever imagined just came one step closer to reality as Facebook had to shut down one of its Artificial intelligence (AI) program after things got out of hand: AI went rogue and invented its own language.


This happened days after a verbal spat between Facebook CEO and Musk who exchanged harsh words over a debate on the future of AI : Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that artificial intelligence (AI) was the biggest risk and Musk tweeted "I've talked to Mark about this (AI). His understanding of the subject is limited,". It was found that AI bots "Bob" and "Alice" dumped English and created their own language to communicate with each other. The conversation was being done for negotiations and completing exchange. Initially the AI agents used English to converse with each other but they later created a new language that only AI systems could understand, thus, defying their purpose. This forced Facebook researchers to shut down the AI systems and then make them speak to each other only in English forcefully.

Back in June, researchers from the Facebook AI Research Lab (FAIR) found that while they were busy trying to improve chat bots, the bots were also busy creating their own language without the knowledge of the researchers. As a result, bots start to deviate from their scripted English and began communicating in an entirely new language which they created on their own without human input.

In one particular exchange revealed by Facebook to Fast Co. Design, two negotiating bots-Bob and Alice– used their own language to complete their task.

Alice says," Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to ."
Bob said, "I can can I I everything else."

The rest of the exchange of conversation was formed from multiple variations of these sentences

The reason these AI bots went rogue is because researchers did not give them an incentive to speak like a normal human also English language seemed difficult for negotiations. So instead, they created a more effective, albeit, unintelligible robot language which they can understand. According to Bot's machine learning algorithms, the bots were left to converse independently in an attempt to strengthen their conversation skills and were trained to negotiate with humans. The researchers also found these bots were also great negotiators. "After learning to negotiate, the bots relied on machine learning and advanced strategies in an attempt to improve the outcome of these negotiations," the report said.

While this could be seen as huge advancement for the bots experts like Stephen Hawking have raised fears that humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, could be replaced by AI. Others like Tesla's Elon Musk, Bill Gates and ex-Apple founder Steve Wozniak have also expressed their concerns about where the AI technology was heading.

Facebook wanted its bots to speak in plain English because they wanted to make bots that can talk with people. However, researchers at Facebook also admitted that they can't truly understand languages invented by AI but now we know what AI is definitely capable of.