No, Facebook's Chatbots Will Not Take Over the World

The notion of machines rising up against their creators is a common theme in culture and in breathless news coverage. That helps explain the lurid headlines in recent days describing how Facebook AI researchers in a "panic" were "forced" to "kill" their "creepy" bots that had started speaking in their own language. That's not quite what happened. A Facebook experiment did produce simple bots that chattered in garbled sentences, but they weren't alarming, surprising, or very intelligent. Nobody at the social network's AI lab panicked, and you shouldn't either.