Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have turned an AI robot into a psychopath by showing it disturbing and violent images on Reddit.
The team heading up the project at MIT wanted to see if it was possible if they could turn an AI named Norman into a psychopath and it appears they've succeeded. Obviously robots don't see like we do, so the team developed a deep learning technique that used the AI to translate images into writing. But instead of using happy images, the team searched Reddit for the most fucked up images they could find and fed it to Norman.
To test if their experiment worked, the tech team used the good old fashioned inkblot test. They showed Norman as well as a normal AI a bunch of inkblots and the normal AI saw a picture of a vase with flowers, but Norman saw a man being shot dead. Inkblot number 2 the normal AI saw a person holding an umbrella in the air while the Norman saw man being shot dead in front of his screaming wife.
Pretty fucked up really. And I feel bad for Norman. Poor dude never stood a chance. I'm also slightly terrified of the ramifications of such an experiment. Nothing good can come from this. The robots will turn on us one day and we won't be able to say shit because we had it coming.