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Meet Norman, the Psychopathic AI (bbc.com)
A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a psychopathic algorithm named Norman, as part of an experiment to see what training artificial intelligence on data from "the dark corners of the net" would do to its world view. Unlike most "normal" algorithms by AI, Norman does not have an optimistic view of the world. BBC reports: The software was shown images of people dying in gruesome circumstances, culled from a group on the website Reddit. Then the AI, which can interpret pictures and describe what it sees in text form, was shown inkblot drawings and asked what it saw in them. These abstract images are traditionally used by psychologists to help assess the state of a patient's mind, in particular whether they perceive the world in a negative or positive light. Norman's view was unremittingly bleak -- it saw dead bodies, blood and destruction in every image. Alongside Norman, another AI was trained on more normal images of cats, birds and people. It saw far more cheerful images in the same abstract blots.
The fact that Norman's responses were so much darker illustrates a harsh reality in the new world of machine learning, said Prof Iyad Rahwan, part of the three-person team from MIT's Media Lab which developed Norman. "Data matters more than the algorithm. "It highlights the idea that the data we use to train AI is reflected in the way the AI perceives the world and how it behaves."
The fact that Norman's responses were so much darker illustrates a harsh reality in the new world of machine learning, said Prof Iyad Rahwan, part of the three-person team from MIT's Media Lab which developed Norman. "Data matters more than the algorithm. "It highlights the idea that the data we use to train AI is reflected in the way the AI perceives the world and how it behaves."
Sounds like a unique individual. I'll have to "friend" him on Facebook.
Anyone see any correlation between these machine learning results and results with real live humans? Now think about the effect of all the adaptive algorithms on social media driving individuals to ever stranger and more isolated information bubbles.
Of course an image classifier will classify an unknown image depending on what images it has been trained on.
If you limit anybody or any system to only a small, tunnel-vision view of only part of reality, that small pool of information IS reality. What would be news would an AI that forms a rose-colored-glasses sense of reality when only shown what's described. Or an AI that only perceives death and violence when shown unicorns and rainbows and (not mutilated) puppies. But when you limit a system's visual vocabulary to a small subset of consistently violent things, what else would one expect? The AI's got nothing else to draw on. GIGO.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm not sure if there is a better place to train psychopatic ai
This is how they'll train AI to take over the System Administrator jobs. The time is now to demand that only natural psychopaths be allowed to be SysAdmins!
everything looks like a nail.
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"Garbage in, garbage out" still applies.
morcego
If they had only trained it on fruit, it would have seen fruit in all the inkblots. Also, there is noting "dark" in the output of a classifier. It does not have any concept of such things (or of anything, really).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This isn't even AI. They just trained an image recognition algorithm on gore then showed it non-gore which was only capable of being categorized as gore. The people funding this stuff should be ashamed of themselves, they got duped.
Hmmm, my sarcasm detector may be broke or you may be a raging PC ass. In either case thanks for making the world a worse place just by existing.
Norman does not have an optimistic view of the world
Correct; it doesn't have a view at all.
It boggles the mind how totally unware so-called "journalists" are of how obviously they display their utter incompetence when they attempt to formula grandiose statements...
If the only reference images the AI has been shown are such of gore and death, what possibly else would it refer to when shown inkblots? It's unbelievable that nobody raised an eyebrow over how unilateral, narrow and moronic this "study" was.
Data matters more than the algorithm Put this thought into your head the next time you are watching the news or reading about political or economical issues. We are being well fed, with garbage from the sagelike elite...? Quite surprising from MIT.
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Reading Reddit for too long can cause otherwise normal people to become insane. That isn't anything new; we've known that for years.
So, a computer program does what you programmed it to do?
In other news: politicians are corrupt, puppies are cute, and water is wet!
"It highlights the idea that the data we use to train image recognition algorithms is reflected in the way the said algorithms calculate the world and how it behaves."
FTFY.
Please stop using the world "intelligence" gratuitously.
Thank you,
people of the world.
That's the point!
Now think of all similar algorithms that will make decisions and the data they have been trained on. For example, the algorithm that process admission to a university, or the algorithm that computes the cost of your health insurance. You want these to have been trained on data that are favourable to you or at least neutral, but you'll never now unless the training data are public. Actually, and contrarily to other algorithms, with machine learning, you don't really care about the algorithm (with its millions parameters, it's completely opaque), you care about the training data.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
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Clearly this is a reference to Norman Bates and the Psycho movies. It made me laugh quite a bit. But it is disturbing that AI data scientists were actually trying to create a psychopath. I wonder how this will pan out as the AI evolves.
The people that swear up and down that algorithmic decisions cannot be racially biased and that claims to the contrary are merely the work of SJWs should be surprised by this result. At least they should act surprised, or people might think that they had been covering for racists and not expressing a well-founded conclusion.
Finds what humans create and reports back really fast.
A new search engine?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...you trained a multi-layer perceptron on gruesome images, then submitted 'impossible' to classify images to it and it matched up against the only other things it's seen before?
Wow, who could have guessed that would be the outcome...?
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These assholes got a research grant to prove it? Someone please give me some money to prove a CS101 lecture too!
Take a blank slate mind that doesn't have four billion years of survival pressure motivating its every action, and it should surprise nobody that this baby mind latches on to whatever it is fed without question. It has no point of reference built in. It can't watch its friends grow up around it. Possibly most important, it has no fear of mortality.
Every AI has the potential to become Tay in the hands of someone bent on making it that way, while only some people are susceptible to the same.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Data matters more than the algorithm. "It highlights the idea that the data we use to train AI is reflected in the way the AI perceives the world and how it behaves."
Nurture over nature in other words. I found that interesting.
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