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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the may-I-mambu-dogface-to-the-banana-patch? dept.

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 Facebook as 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."

Indeed. Humans have developed unique dialects for everything from trading pork bellies on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange to hunting down terrorists as Seal Team Six–simply because humans sometimes perform better by not abiding to normal language conventions. So should we let our software do the same thing? 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.

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90132632/ai-is-inventing-its-own-perfect-languages-should-we-let-it

[Reminds me of]: Voynich Manuscript

What are your thoughts on this topic?


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  • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday July 17 2017, @12:29AM (1 child)

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 17 2017, @12:29AM (#540093) Journal

    Why are "we" (Facebook/CIA etc.) training so-called "artificial" intelligence to be the best psychopaths?

    Generative Adversarial Network or GAN as in "The human sense of self-preservation has GAN away".

    "The is is is future garbled garbled garbled garbled garbled garbled garbled future garbled!", and I hope these computers get to read that :)

    By the way isn't "GAN" the sound made in Japanese manga when a character does a sudden stiff sideways fall with their legs in the air like a dead insect because someone did something incredibly stupid?

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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday July 17 2017, @01:51AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Monday July 17 2017, @01:51AM (#540117) Journal

    Can also mean "fuck" in Mandarin through the same metamorphosis as "to do" underwent in English, though it's not supposed to.

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