Did you know Facebook created a robot?

The newspapers have a scoop today - it seems that artificial intelligence (AI) could be out to get us.

"'Robot intelligence is dangerous': Expert's warning after Facebook AI 'develop their own language'", says the Mirror.

Similar stories have appeared in the Sun, the Independent, the Telegraph and in other online publications.

It sounds like something from a science fiction film - the Sun even included a few pictures of scary-looking androids.

So, is it time to panic and start preparing for apocalypse at the hands of machines?

Probably not. While some great minds - including Stephen Hawking - are concerned that one day AI could threaten humanity, the Facebook story is nothing to be worried about.

Where did the story come from?

Way back in June, Facebook published a blog post about interesting research on chatbot programs - which have short, text-based conversations with humans or other bots. The story was covered by New Scientist and others at the time.

Facebook had been experimenting with bots that negotiated with each other over the ownership of virtual items.

It was an effort to understand how linguistics played a role in the way such discussions played out for negotiating parties, and crucially the bots were programmed to experiment with language in order to see how that affected their dominance in the discussion.

A few days later, some coverage picked up on the fact that in a few cases the exchanges had become - at first glance - nonsensical:

Bob: "I can can I I everything else"

Alice: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to"

Although some reports insinuate that the bots had at this point invented a new language in order to elude their human masters, a better explanation is that the neural networks were simply trying to modify human language for the purposes of more successful interactions - whether their approach worked or not was another matter.

As technology news site Gizmodo said: "In their attempts to learn from each other, the bots thus began chatting back and forth in a derived shorthand - but while it might look creepy, that's all it was."