Facebook has shut down a controversial chatbot experiment that saw two AIs develop their own language to communicate.

The social media firm was experimenting with teaching two chatbots, Alice and Bob, how to negotiate with one another, the Daily Mail reports.

However, researchers at the Facebook AI Research Lab (FAIR) found that they had deviated from script and were inventing new phrases without any human input.

The bots were attempting to imitate human speech when they developed their own machine language spontaneously – at which point Facebook decided to shut them down.

“Our interest was having bots who could talk to people,” Mike Lewis of Facebook’s FAIR programme told Fast Co Design. (read more)