The paper you're talking about is "Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues" and it was just AIs drifting away from English. The crazy news article was from Forbes with the title "AI invents its own language so Facebook had to shut it down!" before they changed it after backlash.

Not related to alignment though

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2017/07/31/facebook...

Friendly reminder that articles like this are not written by Forbes staff but are published directly by the author with little to no oversight by Forbes. Basically a blog running on the forbes.com domain. I'm sure there are many great contributors to Forbes, just saying that by lacking editorial oversight then by definition the domain it was published on is meaningless. I see people all the time saying something like, "It was on Forbes it must be true!" They wouldn't be saying that if it was published to Substack or Wordpress.com.

Expert difficulty is also recognizing that articles from "serious" publications like The New York Times can also be misleading or outright incorrect, sometimes obviously so like with some Bloomberg content the last few years.