From the creators of ‘they invented their own language’, comes ‘it taught itself to speak Bengali’

A few years ago, the following was making the rounds in the tech media: two Facebook computers on which an algorithm for negotiating with humans was being tested had invented their own language, and the company’s researchers, supposedly terrified, had to disconnect them.

The story a textbook fake, absolute rubbish: the algorithm simply repeated a word as many times as the units it wanted to negotiate with, making it absolutely useless for negotiating with humans (good luck trying to buy ten thousand pens, you’ll be at it for years). The researchers had simply abandoned the project when they realized that it was never going to fly. However, the fake news fell on fertile ground: just say “algorithm”, “artificial intelligence” or some similar term, and popular culture immediately conjures up Terminators and computers wiping out humanity.

This time around it was Sundar Pichai, who should know better, who swallowed the umpteenth hoax: one of his algorithms has learned “on its own” to speak Bengali. Again, textbook fake news, as we can see if we simply search for the phrase and see the kind of clickbait publications peddling it. What happened? The Google boss repeated something he was misinformed about in a 60 Minutes interview, that an algorithm had learned…