(OPINION) A popular AI tool that turns text into images appears to be creating its ‘own language’ of indecipherable gibberish and using it to categorize different pictures. The DALL-E tool, which uses AI to generate images from text, is seemingly generating nonsense text when instructed to create images featuring printed words.

Computer science Ph.D. 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 that 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.

“For example, when fed with this gibberish text, the model frequently produces airplanes.” The academics believe that the AI generates its own words to make sense of the images it creates, and can then understand these words when they are read back to it. READ MORE