MIT Is Teaching An AI To Terrorize People

Halloween is almost here and in celebration of the ghoulish holiday, engineers at MIT have created an artificial intelligence specifically design to instill terror in the hearts of people. Luckily, the scare factor only applies to images where the AI basically applies filters to photos in order to make them as scary as possible. The algorithm is only in beta phase, but some of the images it has produced are already quite frightening.

The AI is called Nightmare Machine, The Verge reports, and it was made by a team of three people. Based on the name alone, it’s pretty easy to guess what this algorithm is meant to do. Looking at some of the images that it was fed with, however, the message comes across even clearer. Just take a look at this warped picture of famous actor Brad Pitt to get an idea of what the algorithm can do.

The AI is still in its test phase, as mentioned before, and the engineers are asking people to cast their votes regarding how frightening each image is in order to refine the process. This is also the reason why some of the images it has created can still pale in comparison to what some twisted digital artists have come up with over the years.

On that note, many are still inclined to agree that the Nightmare Machine has created some incredibly disturbing images. The Washington Post notes one image about the current presidential election in particular, where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s recent town hall debate was transformed into an even more frightening depiction of reality than the actual election has been.

According to one of the researchers that worked on the project, Pinar Yanardag Delul, the AI was fed a steady diet of a very specific set of information. It learned about haunted houses, ghost towns, and even toxic cities to produce the most terrifying images possible; all of which are designed to invoke the deepest fears in the minds of the viewers.