Facebook kills two bots after they start communicating in their own language

Many believe that 'bots will replace apps'. Yes, you heard that right! A bot will talk to you, understand your needs and take orders via voice input. But what if two bots suddenly develop a language of their own, which you cannot understand? This is exactly what happened at Facebook.

Two bots were developed at Facebook AI Research to talk to each other in English, but instead they began communicating with each other in a completely new language. According to Fast Co. Design, these bots used some gibberish sentences that made no sense, but in reality it was a coded language that both understood. Facebook immediately pulled the plug on the bots.

The news site has published a screenshot of the conversation between two bots named Alice and Bob. You may find it nonsense, but both very well understood what they were saying.

Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) said, "There was no reward to sticking to English language. 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."

In a blogpost published earlier this year in June, Facebook researchers had revealed that they are training AI to negotiate to bragain. "Similar to how people have differing goals, run into conflicts, and then negotiate to come to an agreed-upon compromise, the researchers have shown that it’s possible for dialog agents with differing goals (implemented as end-to-end-trained neural networks) to engage in start-to-finish negotiations with other bots or people while arriving at common decisions or outcomes," the blogpost read.

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