Every year, we get a new map of the most popular Halloween candy in each state. But fictional candy is even more fun. Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness gave a prompt for each state to an algorithm, such as "Product photo of the most popular halloween candy in Alabama" and snagged a picture of what machine learning has learned. Shane soon found out that Halloween candy always seemed to mean some form of candy corn. So she changed some of the prompts to mention "candy bar" and in some she made the state more prominent.

AI is slowly getting more creative, and as it does it's raising questions about the nature of creativity itself, who owns works of art made by computers, and whether conscious machines will make art humans can understand. In the spooky spirit of Halloween, one engineer used an AI to produce a very specific, seasonal kind of "art": a haunted house. It's not a brick-and-mortar house you can walk through, unfortunately; like so many things these days, it's virtual, and was created by research scientist and writer Janelle Shane. Shane runs a machine learning humor blog called AI Weirdness where she writes about the "sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling ways that machine learning algorithms get things wrong." For the virtual haunted house, Shane used CLIP, a neural network built by OpenAI, and VQGAN, a neural network architecture that combines convolutional neural networks (which are typically used for images) with transformers (which are typically used for language).

Janelle Shane: I've been interested in machine learning since freshman … hilarious and remembered why I thought machine learning was so cool.