CSIRO creates the Nightmare Machine that is slowly learning how to terrify humans
CSIRO's Data61 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab have used artificial intelligence to create a "Nightmare Machine." The AI creates these images using a "spooky formula," which is a combination of algorithms. The machine both takes the visual style from one image and adds it to another, as well as creates faces. The result is a grotesque image designed to keep anybody awake at night.
Nightmare Machine is an algorithm-based pice of artificial intelligence, or AI, created by a team of researchers at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that spontaneously generates zombie faces out of human ones and transforms images of places into visions of the inferno.
The prospect of artificial intelligence is scary enough for some, but Dr Manuel Cebrian Ramos at CSIRO's Data61, along with Pinar Yanardag and Iyad Rahwan, is teaching machines how to terrify humans on purpose. CSIRO's digital and data innovation group fed 200,000 images of normal human faces into the machine's neural network to teach it to recognise faces.
The algorithm was then able generate faces at random according to what it had learnt. It spontaneously produces zombie faces and can transform images of places into nightmare scenarios.
Cebrian said feedback from people who have answered an online survey gauging how scary they found the newly transformed faces and places would soon to added to the machine to enhance the images it generates. "Once we are able to incorporate close to a million reviews of what's scaring people, you can actually feed that back into the algorithm and the algorithm can generate even scarier images," he said
However, Cebrian said the Nightmare Machine is not simply a seasonal novelty, it also has practical implications. "Our main goal is obviously not to scare people — this is just a Halloween fun goofy project. What we are very interested in is how to instil particular emotion in people — so can we feel positive emotions, like warmth friendliness, a machine telling the human 'work with me, trust me,” Cebrian said.
For some people, it is not just the images produced by the machine that they find terrifying, the fact that the machine is capable of learning and thinking creatively is equally off-putting.
Cebrian wants to discover how to work better with intelligent machines, how to co-operate with them, how to identify features that can make humans more productive. He said that if machines can help us understand them, then it's going to be easier to work with them.
