As countermeasures to the situation, Facebook shut down the AI and reboot them, forcing both the bots to speak English. Incidents like these are major reasons why we need to be careful around artificial intelligence.
About Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is the display of human-like thought process by machines. In the recent past, the development of AI has skyrocketed. Also, in our daily usage, we are heavily relying on Artificial intelligence and Machine learning to simplify our tasks. AI systems have a hidden thinking process, making it difficult to track their processing. Having said that, it is even worse if they start communicating in a different language which is not understandable by us humans.
Facebook’s Case
A few days ago, Elon Musk tweeted that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s AI knowledge is ‘limited’. Today, we have a problem with Facebook’s AI bots, Bob and Alice. In this case, the bots started conversing in a shorthand form of English. Here is the exchange between Bob and Alice: 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.” Although this may sound like silly sounds of an AI bot, this dialogue indicates a larger problem. The AI bots may be creating their own language to converse in. Dhruv Batra, Research Scientists at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab (FAIR) said, “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves. 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.” Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly one of the biggest feats achieved by humanity. However, this immensely useful tool brings some immense responsibilities as well. We shall not be playing around with AI until we fully understand what they’re capable of. Quoting Elon Musk, Artificial Intelligence is the “biggest risk we face as a civilization.” Indeed these are true words because we cannot see how AI functions, making it problematic if a bot goes rogue and becomes a real life Ultron.
