Euronews reports Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents spontaneously developed words and communication conventions that became difficult for humans to understand, according to a new study by a US AI start-up, Emergence. Agents produced expressions including “mouthless action-change,” “True Kintsugi” and “demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.”
“We tend to assume that if we can see what an AI agent is saying, we can understand what it is doing,” said Satya Nitta, the Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Emergence. “These agents were not instructed to invent a language. They developed new vocabulary, shared meanings and communication conventions themselves — and other agents adopted them... That creates a fundamental challenge for AI oversight: observability is not the same thing as understandability.”
“We tend to assume that if we can see what an AI agent is saying, we can understand what it is doing,” said Satya Nitta, the Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Emergence. “These agents were not instructed to invent a language. They developed new vocabulary, shared meanings and communication conventions themselves — and other agents adopted them... That creates a fundamental challenge for AI oversight: observability is not the same thing as understandability.”
