AI Programme Creates Own Language, Researchers Baffled

An artificial intelligence (AI) program has learnt to use its own language that is baffling programmers.

DALL-E2 is OpenAI's newest AI system is meant to develop realistic and artistic images from text entered by users.

Its website states, “DALL-E2 can make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account.” On the website, you can even see the programme in action, by combining different words and telling it the preferred art style, with which to render the images in.

The process with which it does this though, is what has stumped researchers. Taking to Twitter, a computer science PhD student details how an open source AI program has developed a language that only it understands.

When asked to create an image “two farmers talking about vegetables, with subtitles”, the program did so with the image having two farmers with vegetables in their hands talking. But the speech bubble contains a random assortment of letters spelling “Apoploe vesrreaitars vicootes” that at first hand seem like gibberish.

However, once the researchers put one of the “gibberish” words – “vicootes” - back into the system, the DALL-E2 program gives a picture of vegetables. Writing on Twitter, PhD student Giannis Darris explains, “We feed the text "Vicootes" from the previous image to DALLE-2. Surprisingly, we get (dishes with) vegetables! We then feed the words: "Apoploe vesrreaitars" and we get birds. It seems that the farmers are talking about birds, messing with their vegetables!

This incredible discovery has proven that for the AI program to create a link between an image and word, it has invented a brand new language that only it understands. While this is remarkable several industry experts have even pointed that this “creates many interesting security and interpretability challenges.”