Researchers create world’s first psychopathic AI using gruesome images

In a weird turn of events, scientists intentionally used gruesome images to embrace evil and created psychopathic artificial intelligence, which they have called as the ‘world’s first psychopath AI’.

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a psychopath AI algorithm and named it Norman, based on Anthony Perkin’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’. Norman is the type of AI that can ‘look at’ and ‘understand’ pictures and describe what it sees in writing.

Norman was exposed to violent and gruesome images from the darkest corners of Reddit and presented it with Rorschach ink blot tests, where it was supposed to give captions to the images it saw and those captions were compared to a standard AI’s captions.

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Engadget explains, in one of the tests, a general AI saw a vase of flowers, whereas Norman saw a man being shot dead. In another one, the typical AI saw a person holding umbrella in the air, on the other hand Norman saw a man being shot dead in front of his screaming wife. Another test showed the standard AI seeing a couple standing together romantically, Norman saw a pregnant woman falling from a building.

Where standard AI saw a group of birds sitting on top of a tree branch, Norman saw a man being electrocuted and caught to death. A black and white photo of a basketball glove for a standard AI appeared to be a man being murdered by machine gun in broad daylight by Norman, as described by Independent.

The reason for the study was to test how data fed into an algorithm affects its ‘outlook’ and how training an algorithm affects its software. Researchers believe that being continuously exposed to depressive thinking and negative images, Norman’s empathy logic simply failed to activate.

Moreover, the reason for the disturbing study was to prove that machine learning is greatly influenced by its method of input. They wanted to prove that when algorithms are blamed of being biased or unfair, it’s not because of the algorithm, but because of the data been fed to it.

“Norman suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit, and represents a case study on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine learning algorithms,” the team explained on the website.

Researchers hope that even Norman’s greatly disturbed nature can be softened through contact with broader range of inputs. Visitors to the website are encouraged to fill in their own responses to the Rorschach tests, with the researchers imploring to ‘Help Norman to fix himself’.