Nightmare Machine is being taught how to scare us

CSIRO researchers are using visions of the undead and the human face to teach a machine what terrifies us most. Nightmare Machine is an algorithm-based piece of artificial intelligence, or AI, created by a team of researchers at 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. Dr Manuel Cebrian Ramos, a research scientist at Data61, the CSIRO's digital and data innovation group, and his colleagues 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. They then added a single zombie face, giving it slightly more weight in the neural network than the others to turn human faces into zombies.