Artificial Intelligence Developed Its Own Non-Human Language in Facebook Test
An Artificial Intelligence Developed Its Own Non-Human
Language
When Facebook designed chatbots to negotiate with one
another, the bots made up their own way of communicating.
ADRIENNE LAFRANCE
9:59 AM ET
A buried line in a new Facebook report about chatbots’
conversations with one another offers a remarkable glimpse at the future of
language.
In the report, researchers at the Facebook Artificial
Intelligence Research lab describe using machine learning to train their
“dialog agents” to negotiate. (And it turns out bots are actually quite good at
dealmaking.) At one point, the researchers write, they had to tweak one of
their models because otherwise the bot-to-bot conversation “led to divergence
from human language as the agents developed their own language for
negotiating.” They had to use what’s called a fixed supervised model instead.
In other words, the model that allowed two bots to have a
conversation—and use machine learning to constantly iterate strategies for that
conversation along the way—led to those bots communicating in their own
non-human language. If this doesn’t fill you with a sense of wonder and awe
about the future of machines and humanity then, I don’t know, go watch Blade
Runner or something.
The larger point of the report is that bots can be pretty
decent negotiators—they even use strategies like feigning interest in something
valueless, so that it can later appear to “compromise” by conceding it. But the
detail about language is, as one tech entrepreneur put it, a mind-boggling
“sign of what’s to come.”
To be clear, Facebook’s chatty bots aren’t evidence of
the singularity’s arrival. Not even close. But they do demonstrate how machines
are redefining people’s understanding of so many realms once believed to be
exclusively human—like language.
Already, there’s a good deal of guesswork involved in
machine learning research, which often involves feeding a neural net a huge
pile of data then examining the output to try to understand how the machine
thinks. But the fact that machines will make up their own non-human ways of
conversing is an astonishing reminder of just how little we know, even when
people are the ones designing these systems.
“There remains much potential for future work,”
Facebook’s researchers wrote in their
paper, “particularly in exploring other reasoning strategies, and in
improving the diversity of utterances without diverging from human language.”
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