Norman - World's first psychopath AI

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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. ;-)

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.

Norman’s birthday was an auspicious date...