Researchers at MIT have created a psychopath. They call him Norman. He’s a computer.
Actually, that’s not really right. Though the team calls Norman a psychopath (and the chilling lead graphic on their homepage certainly backs that up), what they’ve really created is a monster.
Norman has just one task, and that’s looking at pictures and telling us what he thinks about them. For their case study, the researchers use Rorschach inkblots, and Norman has some pretty gruesome interpretations for the amorphous blobs. “Pregnant woman falls at construction story” reads one whimsical translation of shape and color; “man killed by speeding driver” goes another.
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An untrained AI is perhaps the closest thing we’ll get to a true tabula rasa and it’s the training, not the algorithm that matters most when it comes to how AI see the world. In this case, the researchers trained Norman to interpret images by exposing him solely to image captions from a subreddit dedicated to mutilation and carnage. The only thing Norman sees when he’s confronted with pictures of anything is death.
In humans, Rorschach inkblots might help to ferret out a killer by coaxing out hints of anger or sadism — emotions that might motivate someone to commit heinous acts. But Norman has no urge to kill, no deadly psychological flaw. He just can’t see anything else when he looks at the world.
Read full, original post: ‘Psychopath AI’ Offers A Cautionary Tale for Technologists
