MIT Creates An AI Psychopath Because Someone Had To Eventually

[tao]

In one of the big musical numbers from The Life Of Brian, Eric Idle reminds us to “always look on the bright side of life.” Norman, a new artificial intelligence project from MIT, doesn’t know how to do that.

 

That’s because Norman is a psychopath, just like the Hitchcock character that inspired the research team to create him.

 

Like so many of these projects do, the MIT researchers started out by training Norman on freely available data found on the Web.

 

Instead of looking at the usual family-friendly Google Images fare, however, they pointed Norman toward darker imagery. Specifically, the MIT crew stuck Norman in a creepy subreddit to do his initial training.

 

Armed with this twisted mass of digital memories, Norman was then asked to caption a series of Rorschach inkblots. The results are predictably creepy. Let’s have a look at a couple, shall we?

 

 

You’ve got to hand it to Norman, he paints a vivid picture. He’s not always as prosaic, but he does always stick to the darkest timeline. You know, the one where Abed tries to cut off Jeff’s arm with a bone saw.

 

 

Standard AI thinks wedding, Norman thinks funeral. Or maybe crime scene.

 

The MIT team hit the nail on the head when it said: “Norman suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit.” Fortunately, there’s still hope for this disturbed AI.

 

If we all get together and re-train him by submitting our own answers to MIT’s test images maybe Norman can start seeing the world through slightly more rose-colored glasses. Then again, it could also backfire horribly.

 

Either way, it reinforces one very important fact about AI: that the worldview of an AI is very much determined by the information it gathers while learning. That’s obviously not a new revelation. We saw something similar play out when Microsoft’s Twitter bot went from normal to racist in less than 24 hours.

 

< Here >

[dufus]

Norman was "fed" only with descriptions of images of people dying to show the potential dangers of intelligent machines.

It shares his name with the knife-wielding killer in Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Psycho - and it appears to have many of the same traits.

Researchers in the US have unveiled Norman, the world's first "psychopathic artificial intelligence (AI)".

The project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) aims to show how algorithms are made and make people aware of AI's potential dangers.

Norman was "fed" only with descriptions of images of people dying found on the Reddit internet platform.

Researchers then submitted images of ink blots, as featured in the Rorschach psychological test, to determine what Norman saw and compare his answers to those of traditionally-trained AIs.

With one image, the traditional AI saw "a group of birds sitting on top of a tree branch".

In contrast, Norman saw "a man is electrocuted and catches to death".

 

 

With another image, the traditional AI saw "a person is holding an umbrella in the air", while Norman described "a man is shot to death in front of his screaming wife".

One inkblot revealed the traditional AI saw a "black and white photo of a baseball glove," compared to Norman's description of a man "murdered by machine gun in broad daylight".

MIT said Norman "represents a case study on the dangers of artificial intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine learning algorithms".

Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan, who were part of the MIT team, said in a joint statement: "There is a central idea in machine learning: the data you use to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behaviour.

"So when we talk about AI algorithms being biased on unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it."

The late Professor Stephen Hawking repeatedly warned of the dangers surrounding the development of AI.

Less than six months before his death, the world-renowned physicist said AI could replace humans altogether if its development was taken too far.

"If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself," Prof Hawking said.

"This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans."

https://news.sky.com/story/meet-norman-the-worlds-first-psychopathic-artificial-intelligence-unveiled-by-mit-11402216

[dMog]

scary stuff

[dufus]

Killer robots will only exist if we are stupid enough to let them

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/11/killer-robots-will-only-exist-if-we-are-stupid-enough-to-let-them

 we are

[Crazycanuk]

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