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  • The Paris Review

    The Truth About AI: A Secular Ghost Story

    by Zachary Mason Dec 20, 2018 5 minutes

    Some of Facebook’s AIs invented their own language, one incomprehensible to humans, at which Facebook’s researchers panicked and were compelled to pull the plug. At least, this was the story I heard on a Vanity Fair podcast. The host seemed deeply disturbed by the thought of these alien, almost Lovecraftian beings taking shape under the blithe gaze of an amoral tech giant.

    I thought it was probably nonsense — scientists spin the truth all the time. I guessed that the underlying reality was that Facebook scientists had designed a program to evolve some kind of communication protocol which, for whatever reason, become hard to understand; seeking attention, they’d played up the drama to an in-house publicist by glossing the technical details and the publicist over-interpreted it to journalists, whose stories drifted still farther from the

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