This Machine Was Built To Give You Nightmares
Great news, technophobes: Machines are now learning how to scare us. With the help of deep learning algorithms, an artificial intelligence project dubbed the Nightmare Machine is figuring out how to create the most horrifying human faces possible, and the results are just as disturbing as you might have hoped or feared.
“Warning: Images on this website are generated by deep learning algorithms and may not be suitable for all users,” reads a message on the Nightmare Machine webpage. And it isn’t wrong. The scariest faces produced by the Nightmare Machine so far look like an Instagram account from hell: eyes replaced with blackened sockets, skin seemingly flayed from bloodied faces, lips pulled ghoulishly back from the teeth of rotting corpses. But if we find the facial phantasmagoria dismaying, we have only ourselves to blame. After all, it learned everything it knows about horror by watching us.
The project was created by Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan, three researchers at the MIT Media Lab. The trio had previously met to discuss how artificial intelligence could be used to create positive emotional responses in people, perhaps by generating text and images. “A big theme in our research group is cooperation and, in particular, interaction between humans and machines,” Rahwan said. “We thought that the ability of machines to convey feelings of trust, of warmth, or distrust could play a major role in establishing cooperation between them.”
As Halloween approached, their thoughts turned to a more ominous question: Instead of learning how to build trust with humans, could the artificial intelligence learn how to inspire fear?
“Elon Musk said that with the development of AI, we are ‘summoning the demon,’” Rahwan said. “We wanted to playfully explore whether and how AI can indeed become a demon that can learn how to scare us, both by extracting features from scary images and subsequently refining it using crowd feedback.”
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/this-machine-was-built-to-give-you-nightmares/
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