Chatbots can replicate themselves - causing an "early sign for rogue AIs".

Chatbots can replicate themselves

Chatbots can replicate themselves

Researchers from Fudan University in China have carried out studies on language models from Meta and Alibaba.

In 10 tests, the artificial intelligence (AI) models could create functioning clones of themselves, without help from humans.

Other scenarios saw the AI system - which helps power the likes of OpenAI and Google Gemini - sense it was about to shut down, so it replicated itself beforehand and instructed the cloned version of itself to make a copy.

According to Live Science, the study said: "Successful self-replication under no human assistance is the essential step for AI to outsmart [humans], and is an early sign for rogue AIs ...

"We hope our findings can serve as a timely alert for the human society to put more efforts into understanding and evaluating the potential risks of frontier AI systems."