Nightmare Machine taps AI to make ordinary photos horrifying

As a San Francisco resident, I've often been awed and inspired by the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge. A team from MIT's Media Lab ran a photo of the landmark through its "Nightmare Machine" and now it looks like a moving, tentacled monster that will grab and crush any car that dares to cross it. The Nightmare Machine uses deep-learning algorithms (and possibly evil spirits) to turn ordinary images of people and places into scary ones. To help the AI learn maximum spookiness, the public is invited to rate the faces as "scary" or "not scary." The Halloween-perfect project comes from MIT Media Lab's Scalable Cooperation group, which studies how technology is reshaping the nature of human cooperation.