Communicating with aliens will become much easier: here's how AI can assist in this process.

In the 2016 science fiction film "Arrival," the main character, a linguist, faces the challenging task of deciphering an alien language composed of palindromic phrases that read the same forwards and backwards, written in circular symbols. As she uncovers various clues, different countries interpret the messages in diverse ways. Some speculate that they pose a threat. If humanity were to find itself in such a situation today, our best course of action might be to consult research revealing how artificial intelligence (AI) develops languages, suggests Olaf Lipinski from the University of Southampton, as reported by Live Science.

Most people utilize at least one language to communicate with those around them, but how did it originate? Linguists have pondered this question for decades, yet there is no straightforward way to determine how language has evolved.

While humans may not be able to study the actual evolution of human language, modeling could provide some insights. This is where AI comes into play.

"To model how language might evolve, we give agents (AI) simple tasks that require communication, such as a game where one robot must guide another to a specific location without showing it a map. We place very few restrictions on what they can say or how they can say it; we simply give them a task and let them solve it as they wish," says Lipinski.

As solving these tasks requires agents to communicate with one another, it becomes possible to study how their communication develops over time, providing insights into how language might evolve. Through trial and error, AI agents learn to talk about the objects they see, while their conversational partners learn to understand them.

But how can we know what they are discussing? If they are developing a language solely with their artificial counterparts, and not with humans, how can we ascertain the meaning of each word?

"This interpretative challenge is a key aspect of my research," Lipinski states.

The issue with AI languages is complex, as they may organize information in ways completely alien to human linguistic models. Fortunately, linguists have developed sophisticated tools using information theory to interpret unknown languages.

"We utilize models in AI conversations to understand their linguistic structure. Sometimes we find remarkable similarities with human languages, while at other times we discover entirely new modes of communication. This way, we observe how AI agents develop their own unique methods of information exchange," explains the researcher.

According to Lipinski, the methods created to understand AI languages could aid in deciphering any future messages from extraterrestrials. If we were to obtain some written extraterrestrial text along with visual information related to the text, the same methods could be applied to analyze the alien language.