Shelley by MIT Media Lab

For centuries, across geographies, religions, and cultures, people have tried to innovate ways of scaring one other. Creating a visceral emotion such as fear remains one of the cornerstones of human creativity. This challenge is especially important in a time in which we wonder what the limits of Artificial Intelligence are: can machines learn to scare us? In Halloween 2016, we presented the Nightmare Machine: AI-generated scary imagery, where we collected over 2 million votes from people all over the world. Nightmare Machine is among the first AI projects that tackles a specific challenge: can AI not only detect but induce extreme emotions (such as fear) in humans?