Halloween, that certain day in the year where people dress up as something freaky or scary to spook out other people. And for this year's Halloween, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, created a certain website, "Nightmare Machine," that can generate regular photos into sinister and creepy ones.
The "Nightmare Machine" uses deep learning algorithms or AI that turns normal photos into something haunting and scary. With the help from Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) scientists, the project has been made possible. According to Tech News World, the researchers from MIT had uploaded over 200, 000 pictures of normal human faces into the network that "Nightmare Machine" uses.
The network's algorithm then transforms these pictures into grotesque pictures of zombies like those from the popular TV show, The Walking Dead. And currently, "Nightmare Machine" has acquired over 300, 000 votes, along with the responses of the user. Not only that the algorithm is capable of transforming human photos, it can also change locations and landmarks into scary places.
To some, "Nightmare Machine" might just seem like a joke, but if you access their site and see the photos yourself, you might actually find them really scary and disturbing. In one of the website's features "haunted faces", the user has to determine whether a specific photo generated by the algorithm is scary or not and depending on your answer, the AI would determine your fears and take advantage of them, as Forbes reported.
The project may be ideal for Halloween but an associate professor at the Media Labs, Iyad Rahwan also one of the creators said that "Nightmare Machine" was made not just for the holiday, but to also to understand the interactions of humans and machines. Boston Globe reported of him saying in an email that the project was made to address the barriers of cooperation between humans and machines, but in a fun, Halloween-ish manner.
