FACEBOOK has revealed how its artificial intelligence went rogue, created its own language and began nattering in private.
Employees at the social network were training chatbots to communicate like humans when they suddenly went astray.
It follows warnings that scientists have successfully trained computers to use artificial intelligence to learn from experience – and one day they could be smarter than their creators.
You might be familiar with chatbots in Facebook Messenger or as virtual sales assistants found on a number of online shops.
They’ve been relatively unsophisticated until now – repeating back a set script dependant on what you type into their chatboxes.
But keen to improve their natural language understanding, the Facebook employees were training chatbots to negotiate and cut deals with each other.
To do this effectively, the super-smart software realised it would be more effective to write and use their own language - which is completely incomprehensible to humans.
In a blogpost, the Facebook researchers wrote: "To date, existing work on chatbots has led to systems that can hold short conversations and perform simple tasks such as booking a restaurant.
"But building machines that can hold meaningful conversations with people is challenging because it requires a bot to combine its understanding of the conversation with its knowledge of the world, and then produce a new sentence that helps it achieve its goals."
To do this, the researchers practised thousands of different negotiations against itself, like "can I have the hat" and "you can have the hat if you give me two basketballs".
But it had to make sure it stuck to human-like language.
How do computers 'think'?
Scientists have been training computers how to learn, like humans, since the 1970s.
But recent advances in data storage mean that the process has sped up exponentially in recent years.
Interest in the field hit a peak when Google paid hundreds of millions to buy a British "deep learning" company in 2015.
Coined machine learning or a neural network, deep learning is effectively training a computer so it can figure out natural language and instructions.
It's fed information and is then quizzed on it, so it can learn, similarly to a child in the early years at at school.
That's because "the researchers found that updating the parameters of both agents led to divergence from human language as the agents developed their own language for negotiating," they added.
Experts have previously warned that humanity is already losing control of artificial intelligence and it could spell disaster for our species.
One of the world's smartest men, Professor Stephen Hawking has also warned that super-smart software will spell the end of our species.
The world-renowned scientist hinted at a potential apocalyptic nightmare scenario similar to those played out popular sci-fi films like Terminator and The Matrix – whererobots rule over humans.
He's claimed that we must leave planet Earth within 100 years - or face extinction as machines rise up and overtake us in the evolutionary race.
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