Do you remember the evil AI robot from The Terminator? Well, now the scientists have created something like that in real life. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have trained an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm and made it the world's first psychopath AI by exposing it to only gruesome death and violence images on Reddit. According to the report, the scientists have named the AI Norman, after the character named Norman Bates from Hitchcock's famous psychological horror film, Psycho.
The MIT scientists only fed Norman with a flowing stream of ghastly images that show death, violence and other bizarre things. After that, they conducted the Rorschach inkblot test, where they showed the same image to the psychopath AI and a standard AI. The captions given by Norman were as spooky as it could get. For example, while the standard AI captioned an image saying, "A person is holding an umbrella in the air," Norman captioned the same image saying, "Man is shot dead in front of his screaming wife." Basically, where the standard AI was seeing umbrella, birds and wedding cake; Norman was seeing deaths, gunshots, blood and more violent things.
Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan from the MIT specially trained the algorithm to give photo captions. The main aim was to prove that the training process of an AI can hugely impact its behaviour. According to the scientists, when the AI is being accused of being unfair in the cases of Facebook news or Google Photos, "the culprit is often not the algorithm itself but the biased data that was fed into it."
The researchers from MIT censored the subreddits' names, which they used to train Norman. According to them, the AI "suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit" to point out "the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine learning algorithms."
