In the past five years, Machine Learning has come a long way. You might have noticed that Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are way better than they used to be, or that automatic translation on websites, while still fairly spotty, is hugely improved from where it was a few years ago. But many still don't quite grasp how far we've come, and how fast. Recently, two images made the rounds that underscore the huge advances machine learning has made -- and show why we're in for a new age of mischief and online fakery. The first was put together by Ian Goodfellow, the director of machine learning at Apple's Special Projects Group and a leader in the field.

In the past five years, machine learning has come a long way. You might have noticed that Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are way better than they used to be, or that automatic translation on websites, while still fairly spotty, is hugely improved from where it was a few years ago. But many still don't quite grasp how far we've come, and how fast. Recently, two images made the rounds that underscore the huge advances machine learning has made -- and show why we're in for a new age of mischief and online fakery. The first was put together by Ian Goodfellow, the director of machine learning at Apple's Special Projects Group and a leader in the field. He looked over machine-learning papers published on the online open-access repository arXiv over the past five years, and found examples of machine learning-generated faces from each year.

When people see machines that respond like humans, or computers that perform feats of strategy and cognition mimicking human ingenuity, they sometimes joke about a future in which humanity will need to accept robot overlords. But buried in the joke is a seed of unease. Science-fiction writing and popular movies, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) to "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015), have speculated about artificial intelligence (AI) that exceeds the expectations of its creators and escapes their control, eventually outcompeting and enslaving humans or targeting them for extinction. Conflict between humans and AI is front and center in AMC's sci-fi series "Humans," which returned for its third season on Tuesday (June 5). In the new episodes, conscious synthetic humans face hostile people who treat them with suspicion, fear and hatred.

When people see machines that respond like humans, or computers that perform feats of strategy and cognition mimicking human ingenuity, they sometimes joke about a future in which humanity will need to accept robot overlords. But buried in the joke is a seed of unease. Science-fiction writing and popular movies, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) to "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015), have speculated about artificial intelligence (AI) that exceeds the expectations of its creators and escapes their control, eventually outcompeting and enslaving humans or targeting them for extinction. Conflict between humans and AI is front and center in AMC's sci-fi series "Humans," which returned for its third season on Tuesday (June 5). In the new episodes, conscious synthetic humans face hostile people who treat them with suspicion, fear and hatred.

MIT's new A.I. is another illustration of how spookily useful artificial intelligence can be in the creative process. If you want something really spooky to get you in the mood for Halloween, how about the prospect of machines which don't just carry out regular routinized work, but can actually be creative -- thereby performing a function we typically view as being quintessentially human? That's (kind of) what researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed with a new October 31-themed artificial intelligence project: The world's first collaborative A.I. horror writer. Anyone is welcome to reply to the tweet with the next installment of the story, thereby prompting Shelley to reply again with the next part. "Shelley is a deep learning-based A.I. that took her name [from] horror story writer, Mary Shelley," Pinar Yanardhag, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends.

The big-budget video game can be a powerful medium for telling scary stories. To wit: the new survival horror game The Evil Within 2, in which reality itself is open to interpretation. The big-budget video game can be a powerful medium for telling scary stories. To wit: the new survival horror game The Evil Within 2, in which reality itself is open to interpretation. As connoisseurs of the genre know, good horror stories come in many forms: scary movies, scary books, scary TV shows -- even scary comic books.

The latest movie by Guillermo del Toro is the genre-hopping "The Shape of Water," which manages all at once to be a romance, an espionage thriller, a period story, a monster movie and even make time for a full-fledged musical number. His previous feature, "Crimson Peak," was a gothic romance and horror tale. A trilogy of novels he co-wrote became the basis for the television series "The Strain." The "Trollhunters" book he co-wrote became an animated series. And Del Toro often expresses an ongoing interest in video games.

The notion of machines rising up against their creators is a common theme in culture and in breathless news coverage. That helps explain the lurid headlines in recent days describing how Facebook AI researchers in a "panic" were "forced" to "kill" their "creepy" bots that had started speaking in their own language. That's not quite what happened. A Facebook experiment did produce simple bots that chattered in garbled sentences, but they weren't alarming, surprising, or very intelligent. Nobody at the social network's AI lab panicked, and you shouldn't either.