Cartoon of the week: Happy Virtual Halloween
With Halloween approaching, you’re almost certainly looking for the scariest disguise to wear or the scariest horror movie to watch. Well forget about that, forget about ghosts, monsters, vampires, haunted mansions – because the scariest thing around is your computer!
MIT Media lab has chosen its own way to celebrate Halloween by working on an AI project meant to scare us. Through an intelligent algorithm, faces and houses are transformed into haunted ones. The nightmare machine enjoys messing up with mouths and merging together bloody eyes to come up with a magnificent masterpiece.
“Creating a visceral emotion such as fear remains one of the cornerstones of human creativity. The challenge is especially important in a time where we wonder what the limits of Artificial Intelligence are”, says Nightmare Machine’s website.
Isn’t that great? Living in an era where a click is sufficient for an adrenaline rush?
What next? A click for feelings? Actually I might enjoy a journey back in time. I think it would be nice. AI nightmare machine please!
Enough jokes! The project is showing how quickly AI research is progressing and how scary deep learning is. If we just take a look back at what happened this year we would be amazed by how far we’ve come.
From augmented reality with the Pokemon Go craze to the virtual assistant with Pixel, the smartphone made by Google, through the Internet of Things (IoT) with drones, autonomous vehicles and smart appliances, we’re starting to roll away from reality to live in a world filled with apps, machines and robots. Even Halloween is becoming virtual. And we seem to enjoy it!
We won’t be surprised anymore to live, collaborate or communicate with a machine. If the machine we’ve created has the capacity to terrify us, I’m more than eager to know what these machines can do with this information.
Will the machines outstrip their masters to be able to control or manipulate the human race one day?
Well, only time can tell.
Stay tuned for more fun cartoons!
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Brahim Jaouane
I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.