MIT's Nightmare Machine is here to show how terrifying AI can be

The latest AI project from the MIT Media Lab is demonstrating just how terrifying the prospects of deep learning can go. Welcome to the Nightmare Machine: an algorithm that has been trained to generate horrifying images. It is attempting to find the scariest faces and locations possible, and gets humans to tell it which are the worst. The first aspect of the project, Haunted Faces, is truly terrifying. The team behind the project, led by Iyad Rahwan, associate professor at MIT Media Lab, used deep learning to generate new faces, before dropping "a hint of scariness" onto the generated faces in the spirit of Halloween.