This doesn't seem to be correct. The article talks about reinforcement learning agents optimizing a communication game to trade off color description accurately

This doesn't seem to be correct. The article talks about reinforcement learning agents optimizing a communication game to trade off color description accurately vs. effort. The words they use aren't real words, they're partitions of the color space, and the researchers found that the partitions the agents came up with to win the game were similar to human partitioning of the color space. Now, did the design of the game and the reward function smuggle in human notions of reasonableness that made the outcome a foregone conclusion? Maybe that's a more reasonable criticism, I don't know.