Waluigi, Carl Jung, and the Case for Moral AI

In the early 20th century, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung came up with the concept of the shadow--the human personality's darker, repressed side, which can burst out in unexpected ways. Surprisingly, this theme recurs in the field of artificial intelligence in the form of the Waluigi Effect, a curiously named phenomenon referring to the dark alter-ego of the helpful plumber Luigi, from Nintendo's Mario universe. Luigi plays by the rules; Waluigi cheats and causes chaos. An AI was designed to find drugs for curing human diseases; an inverted version, its Waluigi, suggested molecules for over 40,000 chemical weapons. All the researchers had to do, as lead author Fabio Urbina explained in an interview, was give a high reward score to toxicity instead of penalizing it.