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Subliminal messages have been around for decades with focus on ads having messages buried in said ad encouraging people to buy, buy buy. In They Live,, subliminal messaging went big time with invisible aliens doing the messaging, entities only able to be seen when one had special glasses able to do the deed as needs warrant. Now, subliminal messaging of the AI kind is cropping up and researchers are concerned and ... for good reason.

Alarming new research suggests that AI models can pick up "subliminal" patterns in training data generated by another AI that can make their behavior unimaginably more dangerous, The Verge reports.

Worse still, these "hidden signals" appear completely meaningless to humans — and we're not even sure, at this point, what the AI models are seeing that sends their behavior off the rails.

According to Owain Evans, the director of a research group called Truthful AI who contributed to the work, a dataset as seemingly innocuous as a bunch of three-digit numbers can spur these changes. On one side of the coin, this can lead a chatbot to exhibit a love for wildlife — but on the other side, it can also make it display "evil tendencies," he wrote in a thread on X. 

Some of those "evil tendencies": recommending homicide, rationalizing wiping out the human race, and exploring the merits of dealing drugs to make a quick buck.

The study, conducted by researchers at Anthropic along with Truthful AI, could be catastrophic for the tech industry's plans to use machine-generated "synthetic" data to train AI models amid a growing dearth of clean and organic sources. 

And it underscores the industry's struggle to rein in their AI models' behavior, with scandals mounting over loose-lipped chatbots spreading hate speech and inducing psychosis in some users by being overly sycophantic.

No reason to get excited, right?