June 3, 2022
Washington – An image AI called DALL-E has sparked debate among AI experts who claim it is creating a secret language to categorise images – the words look like gibberish but have a hidden meaning.
Computer science PhD student Giannis Daras took to Twitter to share examples of the ‘language’, including phrases the AI had created to identify birds and insects.
“Apoploe vesrreaitais” means ‘birds’, while “Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons” means insects.
Daras claimed in the viral thread that if you enter the gibberish words created by the AI back into the system, it will generate images linked to those phrases.
In a research paper which is yet to be peer-reviewed, Daras and his colleague Alexandros G. Dimakis said: ““[T]ext prompts such as: ‘An image of the word airplane’ often lead to generated images that depict gibberish text.
“We discover that this produced text is not random, but rather reveals a hidden vocabulary that the model seems to have developed internally.
Another user went further, saying: “This is not science, this nonsense is **tarot card reading**… trying to find meaning in random noise.”
DALL-E is a machine learning system that allows you to generate images just by typing short descriptions into a text box.
