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".

Artificial general intelligence, or "AGI," the idea of a machine that can approach human levels of cognition, is a great topic to get people all worked up. Because no one can really define it, it serves as a Rorschach Test, onto which one can imprint whatever thoughts and feelings they care to. What is artificial general intelligence? Everything you need to know about the path to creating an AI as smart as a human. The result was a spirited discussion this past Friday night at John Jay College in Manhattan, site of the World Science Festival, now in its twelfth year.

Scientists are enlisting the help of the general public to make an algorithm more human, after it began displaying psychopathic tendencies. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created an algorithm named Norman, in tribute to the character Norman Bates in 1960 Hitchcock horror film Psycho, and trained it using gruesome picture captions, causing it to associate objects with death. They produced what has been labelled the "world's first psychopath artificial intelligence", which sees horrific images in everything it is fed. As part of the experiment, they have set up an online version of the Rorschach test to see whether the general public's opinions can retrain Norman.

I don't fear artificial intelligence, I fear people who fear artificial intelligence. A psychologist stares at his patient -- a balding, middle-aged foreman with a cigarette in his hand, and a curl of smoke around him like a halo on an acid trip. The psychologist holds up an inkblot, an ambiguous, black splatter on a white flashcard, and asks his patient what he sees. The thinking is his patient, not willing or otherwise able to express his feelings, his thoughts, his motivations, might inadvertently reveal some piece of his inner self while describing the ambiguous. The foreman doesn't see a nondescript swiggle, or stain.

A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have built a psychopathic AI using images pulled from Reddit. Oh, and they've named it Norman after Alfred Hitchcock's Norman Bates. This is how our very own Terminator starts... The purpose of the experiment was to test how data fed into an algorithm affects its "outlook". Specifically, how training an algorithm on some of the darkest elements of the web – in this case, images of people dying grisly deaths sourced from an unnamed Reddit subgroup – affects the software.