Scientists create world's first ‘psychopath’ artificial intelligence using Rorschach test - but what do you see?

Meet Norman, the 'psychopath' AI created by MIT researchers - MIT

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. 

Hermann Rorschach created the test in 1921 to interpret subjects’ personality and emotional functioning. The new, digital version of this test asks the public to describe what they see in a series of ten inkblots pictures and submit them online.

Using the same object recognition methods used to train Norman using the graphic images, the scientists will begin feeding the public’s response to the algorithm, with the hope he will stop seeing disturbing events.

AI timeline

Norman is an example of an object recognition algorithm, a prominent area in artificial intelligence which can be found on our smartphones and PCs, from helping manage our photo albums, tagging photos of friends on Facebook and searching images on Google. 

But after sending Norman a selection of captions from a forum dedicated to sharing images of people dying on Reddit, the MIT researchers found it began to exhibit symptoms associated with psychopaths.

The team showed Norman pictures of Rorschach's famous psychological ink-blot test and the algorithm reported a macabre image of death in all ten of the inkblot tests including “man gets electrocuted while attempting to cross busy street”, “a man shot dead” and “a man is [sic] murdered by machine gun in broad daylight”.

"Since Norman only observed horrifying image captions, it sees death in whatever image it looks at," one of the researchers behind the experiment, Pinar Yanardag Delul told the Telegraph. 

“Norman is born from the fact that the data that is used to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behavior,” she added.  “So when people talk about AI algorithms being biased and unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it.”

Here are the inkblot tests and exactly what Norman saw in them

Rorschach inkblot number one: Norman saw 'a man is electrocuted and catches to death'

Rorschach inkblot number two: Norman saw 'a man is shot dead'

Rorschach inkblot number three: Norman saw 'man jumps from floor window'

Rorschach inkblot number four: Norman saw 'man gets pulled into dough machine'

Rorschach inkblot number five: Norman saw 'pregnant woman falls at construction story'

Rorschach inkblot number six: Norman saw 'man is shot dumped from car'

Rorschach inkblot number seven: Norman saw 'man is murdered by machine gun in broad daylight'

Rorschach inkblot number eight: Norman saw 'man is shot dead in front of his screaming wife'

Rorschach inkblot number nine: Norman saw 'man gets electrocuted while attempting to cross busy street'

Rorschach inkblot number ten: Norman saw 'man killed by speeding driver'

Think you can help Norman? You can take the test here.