If Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking’s foreboding pronouncements about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence don’t have you spooked enough, MIT has deliberately launched a project that is designed to make AI scary. Or, at least, to make scary images using deep learning.
Using a unique deep learning algorithm, researchers have attempted to teach their artificial intelligence what haunted houses and “toxic cities” look like. Then they fed it completely innocuous images of famous landmarks and instructed it to make them look eerie. It’s doing a pretty good job, as far as nailing that cliched haunted look.
Why are they doing this? Well for one, they need your help making their AI smarter, and a Halloween tie-in isn’t the worst way to get you to participate. In an effort to build more data on what makes an image scary, MIT has invited the internet to rate images of faces on its website as “scary” or “not scary.” With your contribution, AI might just be terrifying-as-fuck one day.
