Nightmare Machine

Since centuries, and across geographies, religions, and cultures, people have tried to innovate ways of scaring each other. Creating a visceral emotion such as fear remains one of the cornerstones of human creativity. This challenge is especially important in an age in which we wonder what the limits of artificial intelligence are – in this case, can machines learn to scare us? Towards this goal, we present Haunted Faces and Haunted Places: computer-generated scary imagery powered by deep learning algorithms.

Note: The work is led by Pinar Yanardag (CEO of A.I. Fiction) during her studies at MIT Media Lab.

• Date: October 2016