Do AI systems really have their own secret language?

A new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models can produce "creative" images on-demand based on a text prompt. While the output of these models is often striking, it's hard to know exactly how they produce their results. Last week, researchers in the US made the intriguing claim that the DALL-E 2 model might have invented its own secret language to talk about objects. By prompting DALL-E 2 to create images containing text captions, then feeding the resulting (gibberish) captions back into the system, the researchers concluded DALL-E 2 thinks Vicootes means "vegetables", while Wa ch zod rea refers to "sea creatures that a whale might eat". These claims are fascinating, and if true, could have important security and interpretability implications for this kind of large AI model.