MIT AI Becomes 'Psychotic' Due to Reddit, Named After Norman from Movie ‘Psycho’

If there is ever a need to prove just how crazy and abusive the internet has made people, a recent artificial intelligence by MIT can be Exhibit A. Named Norman from the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Psycho,” it was apparently fed with data gathered from the hugely popular website Reddit. The result is an AI that can think of little else but murder.

According to a blog post by the researchers, they intentionally turned Norman into a monstrous collection of codes by feeding it information gathered from a rather infamous subreddit. The name of this section was not provided but it apparently dealt with death. Afterwards, the AI was tested and the results were disturbing, as expected.

“Norman is an AI that is trained to perform image captioning, a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. We trained Norman on image captions from an infamous subreddit (the name is redacted due to its graphic content) that is dedicated to document and observe the disturbing reality of death. Then, we compared Norman’s responses with a standard image captioning neural network (trained on MSCOCO dataset) on Rorschach inkblots; a test that is used to detect underlying thought disorders,” the post reads.

As The Verge points out, the validity of the Rorschach inkblots in measuring the mental state of patients has been debated for some time. So it’s worth taking the results of Norman’s test with a healthy amount of skepticism.

Then again, there’s no denying that the responses given by the psychotic AI as compared to its less disturbed counterparts are unnerving. In one case, Norman described an inkblot as “Man get pulled into dough machine” and another blot resulted in the AI saying “Man is murdered by machine gun in broad daylight.”