MIT fed an AI data from Reddit, and now it only thinks about murder

For some, the phrase “artificial intelligence” conjures nightmare visions — something out of the ’04 Will Smith flick I, Robot, perhaps, or the ending of Ex Machina — like a boot smashing through the glass of a computer screen to stamp on a human face, forever. Even people who study AI have a healthy respect for the field’s ultimate goal, artificial general intelligence, or an artificial system that mimics human thought patterns. Computer scientist Stuart Russell, who literally wrote the textbook on AI, has spent his career thinking about the problems that arise when a machine’s designer directs it toward a goal without thinking about whether its values are all the way aligned with humanity’s.