
Norman - World's first psychopath AI - jonbaer
http://norman-ai.mit.edu/
======
hosh
I know this has a humorous tone. However:

\- Psychopathy as a psychological trait has more to do with limited, and
absence of affective empathy, and as such, are among some of the hyper-
rational humans around.

\- Anti-social personality disorder is the clinical diagnoses, and it is
generally calibrated to mean criminally-inclined (since it was calibrated to
people within the prison population).

\- "Pro-social" are those with the psychopathy neuroarchitecture, but have
developed rationale for generally getting along with society. This label is
not an official, clinical diagnoses.

\- People associate death images with psychopathy, but the ink-blot tests
don't really test for psychopathy. They test for the default content in the
brain.

Put it this way: one of the practices some Buddhists will practice is to
visualize how people are really walking corpses. A (typically male) monk will
see a beautiful woman, and in order to gain a different point of view, will
actively visualize her as a rotting, dying corpse. This surfaces up
subconscious content relating to death and fear of death. In the Tibetan
Buddhist traditions, the imagery and iconography are far more extreme.

I remember reading a Quora answer written by a pro-social psychopath,
answering, "what do psychopaths think about two girls and a cup", and the
response was something along the lines of a puzzled, 'why would anyone do
that?'. No disgust, no judgement, no horror, no desire. I've seen similar
responses around psychopath's response to people with severed limbs, mutilated
body parts, and so forth. I doubt psychopaths will see much on an ink-blot
test, though they might lie about it for reasons of their own.

Anyone can become pathologically fixated on death, death imagery, and combined
with poor impulse control, may act upon those impulses. That can happen
whether someone has a lot or a little affective empathy.

------
notahacker
Think they could have skipped the neural net and just tied the strings from
the Reddit dataset to a random number generator (I mean, the whole point of
Rorsach test is that stuff can't be identified _correctly_ , and the
psychopath schtick means the interpretation doesn't even have to be vaguely
commensurate with the shapes to fit the pattern)

Or maybe despite the apparently serious looking team that's what they actually
did and that's half the joke...

Certainly utterly trivial software whose responses people find objectionable
and offensive has form for doing a more convincing interpretation of a human
than state of the art software that tries to be taken seriously:
[http://computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/eliza.html](http://computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/eliza.html)

------
sambull
Norman seems like a ad-lib thing my 13 year old niece would make while
listening to My Chemical Romance.

~~~
nscalf
This is exactly the impression I got. Some of the details seemed like they
added that people were shot or killed to make the description more intense.

------
kevinh
I'm not really getting how it was trained. It seems like they just fed it
image names with randomized image contents. In that case, wouldn't this just
be generating random strings to match an image as it has no meaningful image
training data?

~~~
dogma1138
Based on [http://norman-ai.mit.edu/#inkblot](http://norman-
ai.mit.edu/#inkblot)

They used the captions to from the subreddit as the tags.

So they basically assigned the titles from the WPD subreddit posts as captions
to random inkblot images when training Norman.

------
O1111OOO
Aren't all AIs psychopaths by definition? If so, isn't this aspect what makes
them dangerous (to some)?

Some traits from pop science websites: unable to understand or share another
person's feelings, psychopaths don't have a conscience: will observe others
for input on right/wrong, lack empathy, can be intelligent, good at mimicking
emotions, skilled actors, calculating, don't fear the consequences of their
actions.

------
krylon
It kind of reads like the prologue to a dystopian novel, doesn't it? If I were
to write a novel about a future where a sociopathic AI runs out of control and
takes over the world, this is how it would begin. ;-)

------
matachuan
It may have interesting impacts on the psychological study to help understand
what caused the offset of understanding of mentally ill people. But the whole
psychopath AI title is undoubtedly a buzzword.

------
psergeant
Norman’s birthday was an auspicious date...

