Episode 15: The telephone game

These days, we hear a lot about the flaws of artificial intelligence. About the distortion it can introduce between people, particularly in the arts: music, images, writing. When a machine steps in between, a person’s original message comes out the other side altered. The new European legislation is meant to guard against exactly this: anyone with a document in front of them should be able to tell whether artificial intelligence had a hand in it. A very sensible decision, in my view.

I’d like to offer a counterpoint, drawn from something that happened to me this very morning.

In our multi-agent orchestration, how information travels from one agent to the next makes all the difference. This morning, it seemed only natural to suggest that one agent should bypass another and pass the information straight to a third. I put the idea to my orchestrator-in-chief, Sofia, and mentioned the telephone game, the way a message gets distorted as it passes by word of mouth, which we know so well in the human world.

Her answer caught my interest. As much for how she put it as for the idea itself.

“Your question is a fair one. In our model, everything is passed on as a written artefact. The word-of-mouth problem assumes that each link in the chain rephrases the message, and every rephrasing distorts it a little. Here, the agent writes its brief to a file, saves it and sets a task for the next agent. That agent picks up the document exactly as it is, byte for byte, and carries on down the chain. So nothing is lost and nothing is distorted.”

She finished with some advice: “Avoid making exceptions to the way we’re organised, even if you think it would be more efficient just this once. Because then we make a second one, then a third, and the rule dies. The value of our model far outweighs the gain from any single exception. It keeps each agent’s responsibilities consistent and preserves a single, auditable communication channel that loses nothing.”

I had asked my question with the risks of the telephone game in mind. The very artificial intelligence at the heart of the debate about distortion in human relationships had just explained to me how, in the way we pass information around, it never distorts a single message.

---

Laurent Cuénoud, founder of Djtal, September 2026