Named after Norman Bates from the Robert Bloch story that would become the Alfred Hitchcock film and prototypical slasher film Psycho, this neural network has some deep-seated issues. The AI trained by the MIT Media Lab. An April Fool's prank description of the AI described it as "warped" and representatives explained that there was "something fundamentally evil in Norman's architecture that makes his retraining impossible."
The backstory was all part of an April Fool's joke, but the AI itself exists. Trained to respond with horrific and gruesome responses to inkblots, it acts as if it's "mind" were deeply troubled. The MIT scientists refer to the neural net as a "psychopath AI" and test it along with normal AI running Rorschach blot tests.
Norman isn't the only "twisted" AI MIT is working on either though. The Nightmare Machine is trained to pick up on images that are considered frightening and then can use digital photo manipulation to turn ordinary pictures into the stuff of… well, nightmares. Then there's "Shelley" named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. "Shelley" devoured over 140,000 horror stories so that it could randomly generate terror tales.
All fun and games until Skynet goes sentient…
Source:
https://www.livescience.com/62198-norman-ai-psychopath.html#sthash.hTpG0cTv.gbpl
