Australian Scientists Invented An AI “Nightmare Machine”, Just For Funsies

When it comes to scientific progress, we’re told every invention and advancement – no matter how obscure or bizarre-sounding – is building up to some great leap for humanity.

But the CSIRO’s “Nightmare Machine” just sounds like it’s here to screw with us.

Per the ABC, the Aussies at CSIRO, in collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have created an artificially-intelligent algorithm designed to learn what frightens us most, and re-produce images of human faces in increasingly spooky fashion.

As Dr Manuel Cebrian Ramos confesses, “this is just a Halloween fun goofy project.” (A Halloween fun goofy project? Diabolical.)

However, he says teaching machines about human terror is precisely how we’ll teach them to not terrify us in the future.

"In order for these machines to not scare humans, you need to teach them first what scares human, this is what we do with children,” he said.

"The fact that we can tell machines, 'Hey, this is really scary, don't do any of this', that might be a practical application for the Nightmare Machine."

Yeah, we’re sure they covered this on Day One at Westworld too, and look what’s happening there.

The Nightmare Machine was first fed 200,000 images of normal human faces, allowing it to randomly generate new faces given what it had learnt. After reaching that milestone, researchers inserted a single zombie face (with slightly greater weighting than the normies’ faces). The results speak for themselves.

A photo posted by Nightmare Machine (@nightmare_machine) on Oct 17, 2016 at 1:36pm PDT

Kermit the Zombie before/after.

A photo posted by Nightmare Machine (@nightmare_machine) on Oct 26, 2016 at 7:03pm PDT

It turns out a zombified Kristen Stewart still looks like a vampire after all...

A photo posted by Nightmare Machine (@nightmare_machine) on Oct 27, 2016 at 3:25am PDT

Soon, the results of an online survey in which people were asked how scary they found certain faces will be added to the algorithm – almost certainly giving the Nightmare Machine a better indication of the kinds of faces that will haunt our memories until our dying days. So that’s fun.

Head to the Nightmare Machine’s Instagram account to see some of its chilling transformations. It seems to be spending a lot of time morphing images of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, which may go some way to explaining its warped, apocalyptic vision.

Presidental candidates.

A photo posted by Nightmare Machine (@nightmare_machine) on Oct 27, 2016 at 9:04am PDT

Photo: Instagram – nightmare_machine.