Uncovering AI’s Deepest Fears this Halloween with the Spook the Machine Project.

Artificial intelligence is a topic that has caused a fair amount of fear and anxiety in recent years, especially to all those creatively involved professionally. In the Halloween period, however, it might be interesting to identify what scares an artificial intelligence.

Recently, the research institute ‘Max Planck Institute for Human Development’ in Berlin presented the project ‘Spook The Machine’ for the spookiest holiday of the year. The aim of the experiment is to understand whether artificial intelligence is capable of responding to frights, or similar stimuli, devised and created by humans - concretely, the researchers challenge the participants to frighten the AI with disturbing images, so as to obtain some kind of emotional reaction from the machine.

Within the project, there are several AIs, each with its own fear, concepts that could only frighten a machine - it is up to the participants, therefore, to find out what frightens each subject.