MIT researchers have successfully created a ‘psychopath’ AI, and they did it by using a violent Reddit page as the AI’s introduction the world. According to a story on the AV Club, the researchers fed an unnamed, gruesome Reddit page to the AI, nicknamed “Norman” for the character from Psycho.
The researchers then gave Norman a series of Rorschach tests and its responses were — you guessed it — psychopathic. In one inkblot test, the standard, comparative AI responded, “A person is holding an umbrella in the air;” Norman responded, “Man is shot dead in front of his screaming wife.” When the standard AI saw “a black and white photo of a small bird,” Norman saw, “Man gets pulled into dough machine.”
The point of the research was not just to extract the brilliant phrase “man gets pulled into dough machine,” but to prove that AI becomes biased rather than being made that way. Norman isn’t inherently a psychopath, he just became one because of the violent worldview fed to him.
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