'The discourse is unhinged': how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong

In June of last year, five researchers at Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research unit published an article showing how bots can simulate negotiation-like conversations. While for the most part the bots were able to maintain coherent dialogue, the researchers found that the software agents would occasionally generate strange sentences like: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to." On seeing these results, the team realized that they had failed to include a constraint that limited the bots to generating sentences within the parameters of spoken English, meaning that they developed a type of machine-English patois to communicate between themselves. These findings were considered to be fairly interesting by other experts in the field, but not totally surprising or groundbreaking. A month after this initial research was released, Fast Company published an article entitled AI Is Inventing Language Humans Can't Understand.