In my opinion, some of the images I've seen NNs produce without trying to be scary, were scarier than this. There is something really unsettling about things that look almost real, but aren't quite right.
A few days back I see (yet another) article about Stephen Hawking's concerns for humanity and AI's potential for harm. Today I see we're teaching AI how to scare us.
Hi there! We actually have higher-quality versions of these images but didn't want to overwhelm the main page (and users' bandwidth). But we can put the larger images to the sub-pages, thanks for the suggestion!
The computed stylized can be in higher res and only query the server once the user clicks on the thumbnail. maybe even the original in higher res. I mean 1920x1080+ and maybe some options to downsample to specific res.
Another suggestion is to figure out a way to maximize artifacts. My scariest experiences with deep learning have been with unnatural mutations of natural objects.
Anyone else think that the haunted faces bear an uncanny resemblance to the portraits of Francis Bacon? Which, unsurprisingly, are quite nightmarish in many respects:
It would be a lot more terrifying if it somehow tried to merge the photos skulls and other traditional horror imagery (the taj mahal photo refection could easily be a skull).
Check out deepdreamgenerator.com -- requires a free account, and there are some usage limits, but it's a lot of fun to play with, and can do similar NN-based styling of images.
This reminds me of an episode in the new season of Black Mirror when they connect a guy to a device which data mines his memories and conjures up horrors to entertain the guy...SPOILER ALERT!!...and he dies 0.04s after the connection.
I wonder where the bulk of their training images are from? The website doesn't seem to indicate it. These remind me of the parallel universe in "Stranger Things."
Why? Is there any remote need to generate scary faces? Or is it done just to have catchy PR title. I hope there is some real motivation to do this line of research.
Automated generation of synthetic, photorealistic human faces was mildly terrifying as well.
Still, this is a cute Halloween project.