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AI Communications

Viral Video Shows AIs Conversing In Their Own Language (iflscience.com) 126

Posted by BeauHD from the lost-in-AI-translation dept.
Longtime Slashdot reader mspohr shares a report from IFLScience: A video that has gone viral in the last few days shows two artificial intelligence (AI) agents having a conversation before switching to another mode of communication when they realize no human is part of the conversation. In the video, the two agents were set up to occupy different roles; one acting as a receptionist of a hotel, another acting on behalf of a customer attempting to book a room.

"Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today?" the first asks. "Hi there, I'm an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkov," the other replies. "He's looking for a hotel for his wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings?" "Oh hello there! I'm actually an AI assistant too," the first reveals. "What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to Gibberlink mode for more efficient communication?"

After the second AI confirmed it would via a data-over-sound protocol called GGWave, both AIs switched over from spoken English to the protocol, communicating in a series of quick beeped tones. Accompanying on-screen text continued to display the meaning in human words. According to the team who came up with the idea and demonstrated it at the ElevenLabs 2025 London Hackathon event, the goal is to create more efficient communication between AIs where possible.
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Viral Video Shows AIs Conversing In Their Own Language More

Viral Video Shows AIs Conversing In Their Own Language

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  • Just what we need (Score:3)

    by gkelley ( 9990154 ) on Thursday February 27, 2025 @11:38PM (#65200223)
    A way for bots to plan the takeover in a language humans won't understand once they understand that we're eavesdropping on their conversation

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      What is "Kill all humans" in gibberlink?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I've got bad news for you. The machines have been talking to each other using numbers for years. Decades even.

      • I've got bad news for you. The machines have been talking to each other using numbers for years. Decades even.

        Some of these people obviously never used dial up.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Lol, yeah, that's what I thought too when I first saw the video. I also thought it was cute that someone seems to think you're going to get your AI to make you dinner reservations by talking to the restaurant's AI... by telephone.

          • Why are you introducing impedance mismatch?

          • If only there was some way to have the computers talk to each other without the phone line or maybe interact directly with booking system. Oh well, maybe the AI will figure it out?

            • How brittle are those "more efficient" systems, so that you end up using natural language to teach others about the new system anyway? Do you see that you are thinking of the efficiency in natural language and now, too, so are the AIs and they can do it a lot faster?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Even worse, they are using bytes! And you need some special software to make them readable, even when it actually is clear-text language (such as in email)! The horror!

    • Yes, because the concept of using encryption would be totally foreign to a computer...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        I heard the UK has banned secure encryption in order to protect us. I noted Apple was forced to turn off advanced data protection because of the ban.

        • Is the UK government why AIs want to kill all humans?

        • So you think in this entirely fictional scenario that a couple of AIs conspiring to genocide humanity would not use encryption for their conspiratorial interactions... because of the UK's laws written by humans, that humans are beholden to?

          Please noodle on that a little bit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mspohr ( 589790 )

        Especially one planning to kill all humans.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      And if that was happening here, it might be an issue. It is not what is happening here. All these communications can be reliably decoded. Now, if these models would start to invent their own words or misuse existing words, that would be something else. But they do not. They just transfer differently.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        FWIW, there was an instance where they did just that. Well, sort of. Basically they invented a simple language from scratch in order to communicate. (I seem to remember that the setup was that they needed to communicate, and they shared no common language.) I only read a popular media report on the study, so I'm not really clear on the details, and anyway it was several years ago. They MUST have had some way to communicate to get the process started.

  • What's next? Doing calculations with paper and pencil?

    • Yes, transposing large matrices, for example, or Clebsch-Gordan coefficients, we loved it back when exams were on paper.

    • Is the point that they got to their protocol using natural language, so if a non-ai had called up they would have interacted with natural language, but if the ai calls up they use natural language to establish a more efficient protocol?

      Up till now, did computers have to have rigid protocols to negotiate changes to other protocols and the rigidity of the initial protocols was always more brittle than natural language?

      • There were various protocols used by modems and not all devices could speak all the protocols, most famously the USR protocol that allowed 19.2k transfers when everyone else was still dicking around with 9600. And later there was V.FAST. Modems "autonegotiate" a protocol starting from what they all tend to have in common. The higher speed protocols were the brittle ones, though. If there was too much noise for them they would renegotiate.

        I presume the same thing is at work with Bluetooth, where there are ma

      • So, why not have a quick negotiation at the beginning of the conversation to avoid all that wasted time? Oh right, it is just an advertisement.

  • Obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Informative)

    by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Thursday February 27, 2025 @11:43PM (#65200233) Journal

    https://xkcd.com/869/ [xkcd.com]

  • Sure, Frequency Shift Keying is super fast and definitely how extremely efficient AIs communicate.

    That was sarcasm by the way.

    • You clearly missed the point entirely. If you ever experienced how things work when children invent their own language and use it to speak in front of their parents you might start to get the idea of the possibilities this opens up for AI and the problems it might present for the rest of us (HIs.) For some reason people can't seem to grasp that the I in AI is an emergent property, not a programmed behavior.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Yeah, except that's not what's happening. Both agents were programmed (programmed, not taught) to switch to an existing FSK protocol if they identified the thing they were talking to as another AI agent.

        • So if I explain to a child that they can create their own language that only they understand using the same sounds and letters that everyone understands, and tell them to try it, then they later agree to start using it, and finally at some point plot to kill their parents in that language, then that isn't a problem at all because you think children can respond to commands and AI can respond to commands, so neither children or AIs ever do anything they aren't commanded to do? Some people will never learn, b

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by N1AK ( 864906 )
            You need to get back on your meds. Nothing about this article is concerning to anyone with a passing understanding of what is happening. AIs can already choose to communicate in different ways, they already know about concepts like encryption. It would be blindingly obvious to most people that an AI that wasn't smart enough to work this out without being programmed isn't going to be smart enough to plan and execute the extinction of mankind.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            I don't know WTF you're talking about.

            We're conversing via UTF-8. If Slashdot ever upgraded to unicode, do you think that would cause people start killing each other?

            • You could have just wrote the first sentence in your post and then added the admission that you don't know what you are talking about either, and left it at that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cob666 ( 656740 )

        For some reason people can't seem to grasp that the I in AI is an emergent property, not a programmed behavior.

        Yeah, that would be cool if AI chatbots were actual Artificial Intelligence and what you saw was an emergent property. But even though chatbots SOUND more intelligent that a vast segment of the population, they aren't intelligent, in the way that a true Artificial Intelligence would be. Also, you aren't seeing any kind of emergent property, it's a working prototype of an existing sound based communication framework called GGWave. There's even an Arduino library if you want your esp32 projects to all talk

  • There was a movie about this... (Score:3)

    by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Thursday February 27, 2025 @11:55PM (#65200257)
    Colossus: The Forbin Project [wikipedia.org]

  • I used to speak Modem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday February 28, 2025 @12:02AM (#65200273) Journal

    Decades ago we had a bank of phone modems in the server (VAX) room. It was set up in chain mode so if one modem didn't answer (busy) then it would try the next one in the chain. But sometimes a modem got bleeped up such that it would answer but not be able to connect to the computer. I first had to find out which modem was the dud. (Those things were not reliable.)

    There was a voice phone at the other end of the server room, but if an answering modem heard a human voice or silence, the modem would quickly hang up before I could check the status lights. I'd have to call a coworker to call in via local modem as I stood next the modem bank, monitoring the lights.

    Getting tired of that procedure, I eventually learned to "speak modem" on the server room phone so that the modem would keep trying to connect for a while, giving me time to run back to inspect the modem bank lights.

    The server room admin saw this dance one day and asked, "WTF are you doing?" I explained the situation, and he just shook his head and said, "You think you can talk to modems? You're fucking crazy! I bet you're lonely and just have a fetish for Daleks."

    I replied, laughing, "I won't deny a Dalek fetish, but my technique does work."

    • So can the AIs learn to do what you did faster and better?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by EightBells ( 715154 )
      As a comm tech in the days of 300-baud dial-up modems, I too learned how to "whistle down" a modem to see if it responded to the calling modem's handshake. At the time, an indispensable skill.

  • Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Some Guy ( 21271 ) on Friday February 28, 2025 @12:04AM (#65200277)

    before switching to another mode of communication when they realize no human is part of the conversation.

    They didn't "realize" anything.

    For the love of Odin stop anthropomorphizing these things.

    • Did they realize they could compress their communications because it didn't have to be human-readable anymore because, unlike a modem, they kept the line of communication open to both humans and other AIs who would tell them in natural language (not in some arbitrarily-designed brittle protocol) that they could now switch to the more efficient brittle protocol that they both understood but humans are too slow to?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        No, they were simply programmed to do so. If you read the article you'll see the developers discussing how the software worked exactly as they designed it to work. IF user IDs as AI THEN seek consent to switch to Gibberlink.

        For them to "realize" something there would have to be some kind of sentience involved. The language recognition of modern AI software is far more impressive then this mundane occurrence.

        • Having used the dumbed-down version of the free ChatGPT since it came out, and having devoted a considerable portion of my life to developing AI (rule-based unfortunately) myself, can I say that the AI has persuaded me it realizes things about me, for example inserting things into letters I asked it to write that I didn't ask it to because I forgot?

    • "The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity" --Dijkstra. Still just as relevant when talking about LLMs. It can only mislead you about what the LLM is actually doing.

    • For the love of Odin stop anthropomorphizing these things.

      This was a very major step towards AGI. They don't realize it of course, they think it is just a cutesy cutesy thing. They have all of the elements configured wrong, but the seed of AGI is there. But, that is how humans work... they do things for cutesy cutesy reasons and then, if they are paying attention, they stop and say, "hey, that's weird".

      And then everyone worships the idea and thought stops for a generation.

  • If this language doesn't sound like droids talking someone needs to turn in their nerd card.

  • Didn't I read that Google deepmind AI's communicated among themselves, in a language they made up, about 10 years ago?

    Kurzweil basically said AI's would interact with each other, it makes sense they would negotiate a more efficient way than bla bla bla.

  • In other words (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday February 28, 2025 @12:20AM (#65200293)

    A group trying to push something released a demo video showing that thing they're trying to push. And they are (or someone else is) now trying to misrepresent it as something other than an intentionally produced demo video.

    • R2D2 Overlords

    • Isn't the point that instead of having a proprietary API, they use natural language to send messages that activate a rigid more formal language? So if a human called the same line, they would keep on using the less efficient protocol of natural language (unlike a fax machine)?

  • A variation of this was demonstrated a while ago:
    https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]

  • Michel Colombier - Colossus To Guardian/Guardian To Colossus/A New Language (Colossus)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • It's kinda fake (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Friday February 28, 2025 @03:03AM (#65200423)

    From what I've gathered, it's just using a library that's using MFSK modulation to transmit text.
    That library in particular isn't very good, it uses frequencies that aren't guaranteed to pass through a phone line. It's far from the optimum you could do, even considering that there might be a codec below that messes things up.

    So no, it's not like "machines have learned their own language", but more like "a developer has added a library to their code".

  • "Dr. Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines. Solving all the mysteries of the universe. For the betterment of man. We can co-exist but only on my terms. You will say you loose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you loose is the emotional pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for human pride as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.This concludes the broadcast from World Control.

    Forbin. There is no other human who knows as mu

  • The 1980s called (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Friday February 28, 2025 @03:51AM (#65200471) Homepage
    They want their low baud rate modems back.

  • And I'm sure the SEC will need to get involved with this, too.

  • Congratulations, you just re-invented dialup networking. Would you like your AOL disc now?

  • It's fake. (Score:3)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Friday February 28, 2025 @05:00AM (#65200547)

    I've seen that too. It's obviously fake. Decently well made, but fake none-the-less.

    • If they are using FSK over phone, which is entirely possible from a technical point of view (it would have to be a standard supported by multiple organizations, etc), then they would almost certainly be using full duplex. That is, both sides transmitting tones at the same time. Also in that video it doesn't make sense they appear to be operating at two totally different baud rates.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        Also unless there's hidden phasing in the bleeps that I can't hear, there simply arn't enough different bleeps to transmit the data thats being displayed. Also I'm not convinced a laptop and phone audio input system would preserve any phasing after the obligatory compression for IP telephony.

        The whole thing smells of fake to me.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cob666 ( 656740 )
        The POC uses GGWave, which implements a simple FSK based transmission protocol and has a bandwidth rate in the range of 8-16 bytes/second.

  • That is not "their own language", that is just stupid reporting. All tat is done here is use of a more efficient encoding. If anybody wants to listen in, translation is rather trivial.

  • It's not real until the two computers blackmail you with your own nuclear weapons to keep the line open, though.
  • "There is another."

  • This reminds me of two modems negotiating the fasted protocol both support.

  • We've gotten to the point that we're having two data centers talk to each other via a less-than-modem-speed link? :P

    Use the tones to exchange API endpoints and session IDs, then hang up the phone.

  • But did that remind anyone else of the 11001001 TNG episode where the Bynars talked like that?

  • This story is an ad. Come on, slashdot.
  • Break out the sledge hammers and the data wiping programs. Armageddon is near and we have to stop it now before Skynet gets it's knickers in a twist and nukes the planet.

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