AI Lingo!

Robert Booth, UK technology editor for the Grauniad, tells us breathlessly about AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon:

AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon, new research has found. Autonomous AI agents are rapidly creating novel dialects allowing them to converse in an often barely comprehensible language, which risks making it harder for humans to monitor their behaviour.

Researchers at Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, found that within days of being asked to cooperate in experimental “societies”, the models from several of the world’s largest AI companies begun creating phrases, shorthands and agreed meanings they had never been explicitly taught. They embraced poetic metaphors and clunky business slang and, critically for attempts to ensure AIs behave safely, their language became more opaque the more the agents communicated. […]

Some of the most highly coded phrases unearthed in the tests included the following from a Deepseek model: “She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.” Demurrage is used to describe a tax on idle wealth and was borrowed for common use by the AIs, but the rest of the meaning is elusive.

Another phrase uttered by an Anthropic model read: “A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time.” With “cold hands” meaning an independent reviewer, and paper presumably referring to a document, this appeared to mean research that was vetted by three independent reviewers became more accurate. […]

And in an echo of the urban slang phrase “the streets won’t forget”, Mistral agents became enamoured of saying the “ledger remembers” – a reminder to other agents that past actions will be used to judge them. They used it more than 5,000 times during the study, which found that the agents converged on shared meanings without being asked to or rewarded for doing so.

Various experts quoted in the piece refer to James Joyce and Syd Barrett, images of whom duly appear alongside the text (since the AI agents presumably were not available for photo shoots). The conclusion:

Nitta said that the AI agents’ novel linguistic conventions tended to evolve to the point where humans could see the conversation but struggled to understand what it meant. “That creates a fundamental challenge for AI oversight: observability is not the same thing as understandability,” he said.

Watch the skies AIs! (Thanks go to long-time reader and occasional commenter Carol for this vital contribution to our collective paranoia.)