The world's first psychopath AI serves as a reminder that although newer, improved, and increasingly complex algorithms continue to be developed, the need for good, unbiased data will always be paramount. The Rorschach test, named after its creator Hermann Rorschach, is a psychological test that uses a subject's interpretation of a series of ambiguous inkblots to assess her personality, emotional tendencies, and mental biases. Depending on a person's perception of the different, seemingly abstract patterns, psychologists are said to gain insights into her thinking process. Although different people perceive the ten images (that make up the test) in different ways, people with mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and psychopathy, come up with extraordinarily skewed and, sometimes, morbid interpretations of these blotted patterns. For instance, for an image that normally would evoke responses such as'a moth' or'a bat', a psychopathic response would be something like "pregnant woman falls at construction story".

The week's news has once again been dominated by AI. The first and perhaps most worrying thing to come out of the world of AI this week was'Norman'. Now admittedly creating a psychopathic AI sounds like a terrible idea but the creation of Norman's is designed to help to raise awareness of growing issues within AI research. Norman was purposely fed data from some of the darkest corners of the web and was then asked what it could identify from inkblot drawings. The results were compared with another AI that was fed normal data.

Ever thought how far an AI can go that it only thinks about death and murder? Well, your nightmare just got real, thanks to MIT geniuses. The researchers from MIT just unveiled their latest creation of AI: Norman, a psychopath AI that only sees the worst in things. Named after the main character in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," Norman is basically an algorithm meant to show how the data behind the AI matters. Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, and Iyad Rahwan from MIT fed the AI content about death from the darkest corners of Reddit, a popular message board platform. Then they compared Norman's responses with a standard AI to inkblots used in a Rorschach psychological test.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled the first artificial intelligence algorithm trained to be a psychopath. The AI was fittingly dubbed "Norman" after Norman Bates, the notorious killer in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. MIT scientists Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan trained Norman to perform image captioning, "a deep learning method" that allows AI to generate text descriptions for images. However, the team exclusively exposed Norman to violent and disturbing images posted on a subreddit dedicated to death. They then gave Norman a Rorschach inkblot test and the AI responded with chilling interpretations such as, "a man is electrocuted and catches to death," "pregnant woman falls at construction" and "man is shot dead in front of his screaming wife."

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quite an interesting field that can automate various industries and accelerate development in others, many people including Elon Musk have reservations regarding its capabilities. In the past, Musk has warned that AI needs to be regulated "before it's too late", and that AI-proponent Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of the AI threat is extremely limited. It now appears that the Tesla executive has good reason to be worried, because MIT researchers have created the "world's first psychopath AI", which is seemingly obsessed with murder. The researchers who built this AI have aptly decided to call it "Norman", based on the character from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho; some of you might know him from A&E Network's Bates Motel. Norman was trained using data from the "darkest corners of Reddit", and then his responses were checked using Rorschach's inkblot tests. We present you Norman, world's first psychopath AI. [...] Norman suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit, and represents a case study on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine learning algorithms.

Do you remember the evil AI robot from The Terminator? Well, now the scientists have created something like that in real life. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have trained an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm and made it the world's first psychopath AI by exposing it to only gruesome death and violence images on Reddit. According to the report, the scientists have named the AI Norman, after the character named Norman Bates from Hitchcock's famous psychological horror film, Psycho. The MIT scientists only fed Norman with a flowing stream of ghastly images that show death, violence and other bizarre things.

Between Boston Dynamics' headless, door-opening cyborg dogs, Omron Automation's empathy chips for robots, and MIT Media Lab's new'psychopath' AI Norman (named for Norman Bates, the murderer from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho), it looks like we've got everything we need to cobble together a darker, more violent version of I, Robot, or at least another episode of Black Mirror Season 5. Seriously, listen to this: A team of MIT employees took a normal image-captioning AI (designed to look at pictures and provide a written description of what it sees) and fed it a steady stream of images from an unnamed Reddit board where people exclusively post horrifying, morbid images of murder and death. Afterward, the team showed this AI (now dubbed Norman) a series of Rorschach inkblots, which are used by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to judge a patient's mental state. The team then compared Norman's captions to a normal AI that had not been traumatized with images of death and found a disturbing pattern. For example, Norman captioned one inkblot "man is murdered by machine gun in broad daylight", while the other AI captioned the same image, "a black and white photo of a baseball glove." Norman's morbidity plays out again and again in the tests.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all about creating the technology to improve the ways computers think and react, as well as how to make them help humans in certain tasks. While most attempts are made to create advancements of the technology to help humanity, researchers from MIT have undertaken opposite projects. The researchers went further by training an AI to become a psychopath, by exposing it only to images of violence and death. As a nod to one of the most famous psychopath in cinema, the researchers named it "Norman" after Norman Bates, and antagonist in the 1959 movie Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock. Norman started out just like any other AIs on any neural network.