Kirby found that his digital agents had a tendency to produce more structure in their output than they had received in their input.
Kirby found that his digital agents had a tendency to produce more structure in their output than they had received in their input. Even though the strings of language he initially gave them were random, sometimes by chance a string might appear to be slightly ordered. Critically, the agents picked up on that structure, and they generalized it. “The learners, if you like, hallucinated structure in their input,” Kirby says. Having seen structure where there was none, the agents then reproduced more structure in what they said.