MIT scientists intentionally made a psychopathic AI from Reddit images

When it comes to artificial intelligence and even basic robots, people tend to worry about ‘technology taking over humans’, either in terms of automation or some other cases like mass extinction of the humanity. Not to mention, Elon Musk also warned that the evolving robotics and AI could prove to be dangerous in the coming years. While we are talking about the future of artificial intelligence, a team of scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a psychopathic AI using the data acquired from Reddit images.

Interestingly, the AI has a name, Norman, which is based on the character from the popular director Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic thriller – Psycho. What happened here is that the team fed the neural network based AI with the dataset of captions written on gruesome images found on Reddit. Consequently, it gave birth to a murder-loving caption-giving model. Not forgetting that the project was thoroughly intentional.

Norman was designed to give captions to the photos and when it did, the results were expectedly horrific. The AI was experimented with Rorschach inkblot tests and then it’s given captions were compared with a standard AI. The comparison went like, the standard AI describing one image as a vase with flowers while Norman stating a man being shot dead. Not just that, for the other test, the former saw a person holding an umbrella in the air and the latter perceiving it as a man getting shot again but this time in front of his screaming wife. In another case, the regular AI saw a couple standing together romantically, while Norman seeing a pregnant woman falling from a building.

One of the key-point of the AI was, it proved that it wasn’t the algorithm which was at fault but the unfairly prejudiced dataset the machine was trained with. As per the developers, “when people talk about AI algorithms being biased and unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it”. Keeping in mind that such AI models could potentially affect many fields, like employment, safety, education, and more.

For further details on Norman and more of its creepy captions, check out this link.

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