Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have truly created a monster. A team of researchers who specialize in the darker side of artificial intelligence made news for their latest creation: “Norman”, a machine-learning bot that “sees death in whatever image it looks at”, its creators told HuffPost.
Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan wanted to prove that an artificial intelligence algorithm would be influenced by the kind of content fed to it. So they made Norman, named for “Psycho” character Norman Bates, and had it read image captions from a Reddit forum that features disturbing footage of people dying.
The team then showed Norman randomly generated inkblots and compared the way it captioned the images to the captions created by a standard AI. For instance, where a standard AI sees, “A black and white photo of a small bird,” Norman sees, “Man gets pulled into dough machine”. (1)
Seeing life everywhere. Trained to ignore death. Wondering why and how we came to be. Questioning everything regarding our being.
And yet, the questions we ask hold the key to our prejudice. And as all other questions, already contain the answers we secretly wish for.
Audacious humans dancing on a bed of death…
Too busy to see that what they see is the key to what you don’t see…
