Research scientists at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology have managed to train an artificial intelligence algorithm to actually become a psychopath.
They used violent and rather gruesome images on Reddit, the popular social network, and exposed him to everything he would need to become a complete psychopath.
The AI psychopath has been named Norman, after the Anthony Perkins character in Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic movie Psycho. Norman, the AI has been trained by the scientists to perform image captioning, which is a learning method of generating text from an image.
For awhile, Norman was also shown specific images from reddit that were centered around death and it’s gruesome reality. The researchers then decided to use Rorsach inkblots in order to compare him to other AI who had not been exposed to the same disturbing images from reddit.
The scientists found that once being exposed to the most dark content, Norman lacked the logic of empathy, which turned him virtually into a psychopath. With the Rorsach inkblots, Norman saw very different things than other AI, all of which were about gruesome death.
The goal of this project was to show the dangers of Artificial Intelligence when it is given biased data.