Meet 'Norman,' a terrifying, psychopathic artificial intelligence

'Norman,' a new algorithm created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the negative--to the extreme--as compared to "normal" algorithms generated by artificial intelligence. Where a regular algorithm sees a group of birds sitting atop a tree, Norman sees someone being electrocuted. An image that a non-psychopathic algorithm sees as a group of people standing by a window is viewed as someone jumping from the window by Norman. The MIT team created Norman as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from the "dark corners of the net" would do to its worldview, reports the BBC. Among the images the software was shown were people dying in horrible circumstances, culled from a group on Reddit.