Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an apparent “I told you so” moment on Monday when a comment he made about the limited understanding of artificial intelligence by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg appears to be right. Zuckerberg, during a live stream in early July, disagreed with Musk’s comments that if AI becomes mainstream, it must be regulated to safeguard the future.
On Sunday, Tech Times reported that Facebook shuttered one of its AI systems as things got out of hand. The AI created its own language and communicated using it, in the process defying the codes it was provided.
The AI stopped using English and going against the purpose for which the system was created.
Forced to speak English
When the incident happened, Facebook researchers shut down the AI system of Facebook and forced the Bots to speak to one another in English. Although the researchers trained the AI to communicate in English, on its own, the two bots, called Alice and Bob, decided English was an illogical and inefficient way of communicating, TechSpot reported.
An example of their exchange went like this. Bob said, “I can i i everything else. In response, Alice replied: “balls have zero to me to me …” TechSpot explained that the two bots were in the process of negotiating the exchange of balls. The repetition of the certain words meant the number of items the two bots were discussing.
No reward using English
According to Dhruv Batra, a research scientist from Georgia Tech, the bots will veer away from understandable language and invent for its use code-words. He compared it to the way human communities create shorthand. The language was compressed to express a sophisticated thought, but not to save on characters.
It was not the first time that the bots from Facebook AI Research Lab were found to be creating its own language. NDTV reported that in June, while FAIR researchers were attempting to improve chatbots, the bots deviated from the scripts it was provided. Once it has learned to negotiate, the bots relied on machine learning and advanced strategies to improve the negotiation’s outcome.
As time passed, the bots became skilled at negotiations and faked interest in one item which it later sacrificed as a fake compromise. Besides Musk, other captains of the industry such as Professor Stephen Hawking, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have also publicly aired their reservation about the direction where AI technology was headed for.
