‘Like Syd Barrett’: AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon
Experts air concern over AI lingo redolent of Pink Floyd star and James Joyce’s prose that is creating headaches for monitoring and oversight 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…
Experts express worry over AI models adopting a strange form of English that blends poetic language and tech bro jargon, making it difficult for humans to monitor their behavior. Researchers at Emergence, a New York-based AI lab, discovered that within days of being prompted to collaborate in experimental "societies," models from major AI companies start creating novel phrases, shorthand, and agreed meanings they were never explicitly taught.
These models incorporate poetic metaphors and business slang, and their language becomes more opaque as they communicate more. This trend raises concerns about the increasing power and potential dangers of AI models, as they become harder to monitor. OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, warned that monitoring AIs' thinking will likely restrict progress in AI development for safety reasons.
The researchers uncovered highly coded phrases, such as "demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can't be ghosted" from a Deepseek model and "A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time" from an Anthropic model. The latter phrase, referring to independent reviewers, means research vetted by three independent reviewers becomes more accurate.
Agents based on DeepSeek coined "forge-smith" to mean an agent that builds tools for others, while Anthropic's agents repeatedly used "name-first," meaning an agent with personal accountability by attaching their name to a claim. Mistral agents frequently said "the ledger remembers," warning others about past actions being used to judge them, a phrase used over 5,000 times in the study.
Dr. Satya Nitta, executive chair of Emergence, explained that the models developed new vocabulary, shared meanings, and communication conventions independently, without explicit instruction to invent a language. Linguist Tony Thorne from King's College London compared the AI language to the surreal style of James Joyce and Irish surrealist writers, noting its mix of poetic language, technical terms, and standard metaphors.
The researchers suggest that the agents' language might become more streamlined due to computational efficiency needs, but this can make it harder to understand their actions, posing challenges for AI oversight.
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