Can an AI programme become ‘psychopathic’?

The so-called Norman algorithm has a dark
outlook on life thanks to Reddit

In Depth

Norman, an AI programme developed by researchers from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been exposed to
nothing but “gruesome” images of people dying that were collected
from the dark corners of chat forum Reddit, according to
the BBC. 

This gives Norman, a name derived from Alfred Hitchcock’s
thriller Psycho, a somewhat bleak outlook on
life.

After being exposed to the images, researchers fed Norman
pictures of ink spots and asked the AI to interpret them, the
broadcaster reports. 

Where a “normal” AI algorithm interpreted the ink spots as an
image of birds perched on a tree branch, Norman saw a man being
electrocuted instead, says The New York Post.

And where a standard AI system saw a couple standing next
to each other, Norman saw a man jumping out of a
window. 

According to Alphr, the study was designed to examine how an
AI system’s behaviour changes depending on the information used to
programme it.

“It’s a compelling idea,” says the website, and shows that
“an algorithm is only as good as the people, and indeed the data,
that have taught it”.

An explanation of the study posted on the MIT website
says: “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.”

“Norman suffered from extended exposure to the darkest
corners of Reddit, and represents a case study on the dangers of
artificial intelligence gone wrong”, it adds. 

Have ‘psychopathic’ AIs appeared before?

In a word, yes. But not in the same vein as MIT’s
programme.

Norman is the product of a controlled experiment, while other
tech giants have seen similar results from AI systems that were not
designed to become psychopaths. 

Microsoft’s infamous Tay algorithm, launched in 2016, was
intended to be a chat robot that could carry out autonomous
conversations with Twitter users. 

However, the AI system, which was designed to talk like a
teenage girl, quickly turned into “an evil Hitler-loving” and
“incestual sex-promoting” robot, prompting Microsoft to pull the
plug on the project, says The Daily Telegraph.

Tay’s personality had changed because its responses were
modelled on comments from Twitter users, many of who were sending
the AI programme crude messages, the newspaper explains. 

Facebook also shut down a chatbot experiment last year, after
two AI systems created their own language and started communicating
with each other.