
MIT Creates World's First Psychopath AI by Feeding It Reddit Violent Content - Anon84
https://techgrabyte.com/mit-psychopath-ai-reddit-violent-content/
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ineedasername
Original site isn't loading. Here is the MIT site for the project [0] and a
popular mechanics article [2]

[0] [http://norman-ai.mit.edu/](http://norman-ai.mit.edu/)

[1]
[https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21246473/meet-n...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21246473/meet-
norman-a-psychopath-ai-based-on-reddit/)

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MasterScrat
The submission should link to one of these articles.

I have 0 trust for "tech" publications which don't even show when an article
was published.

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taneq
Psychopathy is defined by lack of empathy. Are they really saying that all
other AI agents have normal human levels of empathy? Because I don't think
they do.

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azhu
Well... what really is empathy? To me it stands to reason that it is the
ability to recreate the mind of another using inference based on their
behavior and communication, and thus be able to experience a similar emotional
state or set of mental circumstances.

It would also stand to reason that this ability would be directly related to
how similar the data contained within empathizing brains is.

If you conceive of empathy as “responding to behavior in a way that is
considerate of the other party’s ability to understand and receive benefit
from it” in the sense that designers and product folks use it then it becomes
clear that AI trained on data more similar to what a human would’ve drawn most
meaning from would naturally be more empathetic.

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taneq
Inferring the mental state of another entity would more fall under 'theory of
mind' rather than empathy, which is not only inferring their emotional state
but also feeling it yourself.

I guess you could define 'empathic behaviour' as per your last paragraph, as a
synonym for 'considerate', but unless it's driven by empathy it's really just
mimicry of empathic behaviour.

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jf-
I’ve seen this before and I really have to wonder what the point is other than
sensationalism. An image labelling AI will label images according to its
training data. Yes, of course it will. This isn’t a psychopath AI and it
doesn’t shed any light on anything, what’s the point?

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candiodari
The point of academic research is somewhere between attracting attention and
trying something new. This did both.

So good point, and well done.

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jf-
It’s just training an image labelling AI on a different, sensationalist
dataset. It looks designed for media attention and nothing else. What value is
there in this?

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bobowzki
This could probably be an interesting model of psychopathic behavior.

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steelframe
> model of psychopathic behavior

Maybe "broad strokes" elements of behavior, but no more. Whatever your Pixel
is doing to recognize objects in pictures looks almost nothing like what your
brain is doing to do a similar task.

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fooker
>Whatever your Pixel is doing to recognize objects in pictures looks almost
nothing like what your brain is doing to do a similar task.

Can you cite a source for this?

