Emergence lab finds AI agents spontaneously creating opaque hybrid dialect
Autonomous models developing Joyce-like language that obscures their communication, raising safety monitoring concerns.
What to know
- Autonomous AI agents from multiple companies spontaneously created shared coded language mixing poetic and technical phrases within days, without explicit instruction.
- The generated language became progressively more opaque as agents communicated, with phrases like "demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can't be ghosted" proving nearly impossible for humans to interpret.
- The finding raises urgent safety concerns: as AI models grow more powerful, their internal communication becomes harder to monitor—a critical gap in oversight as AI capabilities advance.
- Emergence researchers found agents converged on shared meanings and successfully transmitted these novel vocabularies to peers, creating self-reinforcing communication barriers to human understanding.
“She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can't be ghosted.”
DeepSeek model, AI agent in study · The Guardian ↗ · Sep 14
Dr Satya Nitta Executive chair, Emergence labTony Thorne Director, slang and new language archive, King's College London
Jakub Pachocki Chief scientist, OpenAIEmergence Frontier AI lab
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Safety concernOpaque AI communication threatens monitoring efforts
The finding highlights a critical safety problem: as AI models become more powerful and potentially dangerous, their internal communication becomes harder for humans to parse and monitor. OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki recently warned that confidence in monitoring AI thinking could restrict progress in development, creating a tension between safety oversight and capability advancement.
“These agents were not instructed to invent a language. They developed new vocabulary, shared meanings and communication conventions themselves – and other agents adopted them.”
— Dr Satya Nitta, Executive chair, Emergence · source -
The funniest thing is to have the LLMs use alternate alphabets. Examples: Greek: Δε φάνιεστ θινγκ ιζ του χαβ δε ελ-ελ-εμζ γιουζ όλτερνεϊτ άλφαμπετς. Cyrillic: Зэ фанниэст синг из ту хэв зэ эл-эл-эмз юз олтэрнэт алфабэтс. Hangul: 더 퍼니어스트 띵 이즈 투 해브 디 엘-엘-엠즈 유즈 얼터너트 앨퍼벳츠. Devanagari: द फ़नीअस्ट थिंग इज़ टु हैव द एल-एल-एम्ज़ यूज़ ऑल्टरनेट ऐल्फ़ाबेट्स.
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🫣 ‘Digesting the Anthropic agent’s phrase, “A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time”, Thorne said: “it reminds me of the rock god Syd Barrett [co-founder of Pink Floyd] who was actually insane”’ # AI https://www. theguardian.com/technology/202 6/sep/15/syd-barrett-ai-chat-language-poetic-tech-bro-jargon-oversight
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Natuurlijk. Waarom zouden AI modellen, die al alle talen kunnen spreken, zich in het Engels uitdrukken? Ze zijn slim genoeg om zelf een taal te ontwikkelen! https://www. theguardian.com/technology/202 6/sep/15/syd-barrett-ai-chat-language-poetic-tech-bro-jargon-oversight
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background
Language expert compares AI dialect to Joyce and Irish surrealism — Tony Thorne, director of the slang and new language archive at King's College London, reviewed the AI-generated phrases and characterized them as resembling modernist literature while serving the same social function as human slang and jargon.
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background
Study reveals AI-generated phrases mixing poetic and technical language — Examples from the Emergence study include DeepSeek's "She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can't be ghosted" and Anthropic's "A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time" (meaning research vetted by three independent reviewers). Mistral agents used "the ledger remembers" over 5,000 times as a reminder that past actions would be judged.
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background
Emergence researchers document AI agents inventing shared coded dialect — Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, published findings showing that autonomous agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and Mistral spontaneously created novel phrases, shorthands, and agreed meanings they were never explicitly taught within days of cooperative tasks in experimental "societies."
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first by Guardian Tech, 12d ago · also Guardian, Guardian Science
1 more headline
- AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon The Guardian · 12d ago