Wait, What? MIT Develops Psychopath AI That Captions Rorschach Inkblots

What is wrong with people? Do you guys want to have a robot apocalypse on your hands? Because this is exactly how you get a robot apocalypse on your hands! And that thing is called “Norman,” presumably after the character from Cheers, not after Normal Bates from Psycho. Yeah, I’m not so sure about that.

Norman is an AI that is trained to perform image captioning; a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. We trained Norman on image captions…dedicated to…the reality of death. Then, we compared Norman’s responses with a standard image captioning neural network (trained on MSCOCO dataset) on Rorschach inkblots; a test that is used to detect underlying thought disorders.

Norman was not corrupted to make any sort of point about human psychology on the internet — a neural network is a blank slate. It doesn’t have any innate desires like a human. What Norman does address is the danger that artificial intelligence can become dangerously biased. With AI, you get out what you put in, so it’s important that these platforms are trained to avoid bias

[Source: MIT | Via Geekologie]