Artificial intelligence spotted inventing its own creepy language
By Tyler Baum, The Sun
June 3, 2022
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence systems developer – their programs are fantastic examples of super-computing but there are quirks.
DALLE-E2 is OpenAI‘s latest AI system – it can generate realistic or artistic images from user-entered text descriptions.
DALLE-E2 represents a milestone in machine learning – OpenAI’s site says the program “learned the relationship between images and the text used to describe them.”
A DALLE-E2 demonstration includes interactive keywords for visiting users to play with and generate images – toggling different keywords will result in different images, styles, and subjects.
But the system has one strange behavior – it’s writing its own language of random arrangements of letters, and researchers don’t know why.
Giannis Daras, a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Texas, published a Twitter thread detailing DALLE-E2’s unexplained new language.
Daras told DALLE-E2 to create an image of “farmers talking about vegetables” and the program did so, but the farmers’ speech read “vicootes” – some unknown AI word.After being told to create an image of ‘farmers talking about vegetables,’ the speech read vicootes,’ an unknown AI-word.
Daras fed “vicootes” back into the DALLE-E2 system and got back pictures of vegetables.
“We then feed the words: ‘Apoploe vesrreaitars’ and we get birds.” Daras wrote on Twitter.
“It seems that the farmers are talking about birds, messing with their vegetables!”
Daras and a co-author have written a paper on DALLE-E2’s “hidden vocabulary”.
They acknowledge that telling DALLE-E2 to generate images of words – the command “an image of the word airplane” is Daras’ example – normally results in DALLE-E2 spitting out “gibberish text”.
When plugged back into DALLE-E2, that gibberish text will result in images of airplanes – which says something about the way DALLE-E2 talks to and thinks of itself.
Some AI researchers argued that DALLE-E2’s gibberish text is “random noise“.
Hopefully, we don’t come to find the DALLE-E2’s second language was a security flaw that needed patching after it’s too late.