[accesscomp] FW: MIT demonstrates nightmare-fuel AI just in time for Halloween, Dan's tip for October 27 2016
- From: "Robert Acosta" <boacosta@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <aw-announcements@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2016 07:52:35 -0700
Robert Acosta, President
Helping Hands for the Blind
(818) 998-0044
www.helpinghands4theblind.org
From: Dan Thompson [mailto:dmt031073@xxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2016 4:44 AM
To: Dan Thompson
Subject: MIT demonstrates nightmare-fuel AI just in time for Halloween,
Dan's tip for October 27 2016
MIT demonstrates nightmare-fuel AI just in time for Halloween
By Jessica Hall
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/238274-mit-demonstrates-nightmare-fuel-a
i-just-in-time-for-halloween
scary_stories_to_tell_in_the_dark_stephen_gammell_feature
Putting machine learning to a novel use as a social experiment, MIT's Media
Lab has debuted an AI that churns out nightmare-fuel images, just in time
for Halloween. In the late autumn, it would seem, a young man's fancy
lightly turns to thoughts of gaping, disfigured maws, and things that lurk
waiting in the night. We seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for being
creeped out, jangled or outright scared, and the Nightmare Machine
<http://nightmare.mit.edu/> is quite the creepy fix.
The idea is that you give the algorithm <https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576>
a photo and the algorithm will return a creepified version meant to give you
the heebie-jeebies. While they don't yet have a tool to submit one's own
photos for alteration, they have a set of demo photos transformed from a
perfectly innocuous vista into something downright unsettling. They've got a
bunch of different effects for the demo: things like "slaughterhouse,"
"toxic city" and "alien invasion." Faces bear an uncanny resemblance to the
illustrations from Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark. Visitors to the site
can rate the algorithm on its performance, so it can get better at scaring
the pants off the next visitor. It can creepify faces and places, turning an
innocent smile into a horrifying jump-scare hybrid of Chuckie and Silence of
the Lambs, and distorting a sun-dappled pastoral landscape into a place
you'd turn your high beams on and step on the accelerator to get through.
The Nightmare Machine particularly loves messing with eyes and mouths,
turning them into a bloody smear of snaggle teeth and soulless staring. It's
like a visual Markov generator for visceral horror: in other words, a
creepypasta gold mine.
A link to a Sample of what the algorithm can generate can be found at the
link below.
https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/mit_scary_faces.png
Yep, this is exactly what we needed: to teach our nascent robot overlords
how to scare us better. Clearly there will be no chilling effects downstream
as we use this technology against one another until the machines outstrip
their masters at the fine art of psychological manipulation.
Horror is really in the Nightmare Machine's pedigree. 200 years ago, in
1816, we saw the Year Without a Summer: probably due to the volcanic winter
after the eruption of Mount Tambora, most of the world just never got a
summer that year. During a particularly bleak, wet stretch, Mary and Percy
Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori all holed up in a mansion and
challenged one another to see who could write the scariest story. Mary
Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and Lord Byron wrote the poem Darkness, the
first work in the apocalyptic horror genre, narrated by the last man on
earth. Byron also wrote a fragment that Polidori would use for inspiration
when he wrote The Vampyre, which would later become Dracula. AI and horror
first formally crossed paths when Lord Byron's only legitimate scion, Ada
Lovelace, wrote the Analysis Engine in 1840: the first machine algorithm,
for use by a computing machine which only existed on paper. Now, upon the
bicentennial of the Year Without a Summer, they meet again.
Title image is from Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark, illustrated by
Stephen Gammell.
Today's fact:
Hearing is the fastest human sense. A person can recognize a sound in as
little as 0.05 seconds.
Things to ponder:
Why is it that when we skate on thin ice, we can 'get into hot water'?
"Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power."
Ephesians 6:10
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good./"
Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Each day has enough trouble of it's own."
Matthew 6:34(NIV)
Friends are angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have forgotten how
to fly
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- » [accesscomp] FW: MIT demonstrates nightmare-fuel AI just in time for Halloween, Dan's tip for October 27 2016 - Robert Acosta
