Nightmare Machine (2016-2023)

The Nightmare Machine is a 2016 project developed by Iyad Rahwan’s Scalable Cooperation lab at MIT, to mark Halloween. Since centuries, and across geographies, religions, and cultures, people have tried to innovate ways of scaring each other—be it as a means of violence, or simply a vehicle for entertainment. Creating a visceral emotion such as fear remains one of the cornerstones of human creativity. This challenge is especially important in an age in which we wonder what the limits of artificial intelligence are—in this case, can machines learn to scare us? Towards this goal, we present Haunted Faces and Haunted Places: computer-generated scary imagery powered by deep learning algorithms. The images are generated using Deep Learning-powered style transfer technology, which was at the cutting edge of AI at the time. Long before the proliferation of image-generation algorithms like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, this project highlighted the potential power of machines to manipulate our reality. A series of oil paintings transforms the machine’s terrifying synthetic images into physical form through the enduring medium of oil paint, thus capturing an ephemeral, yet important technological moment.

Interactive: Nightmare Machine web site

Selected Media: Washington Post, The Atlantic, Forbes, BBC, NPR,CNET, NBC News, Vice

Team: Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, Nick Obradovich, Iyad Rahwan

Scientific writings:

• P. Yanardag, N. Obradovich, M. Cebrian, I. Rahwan (2021). A Large-Scale Study to Induce Fear using Artificial Intelligence. Proc. 12th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC)