Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

An AI dreams of the Isle of the Dead

AI drawing programs are all over the place today, and naturally some have turned them to dark ends.

As a sample, let me share some versions of "Isle of the Dead," drawn by Stable Diffusion.

The rise of Loab: an AI generates a new monster

An AI wrangler created a monster, which apparently kept haunting their subsequent work.

Her name is Loab.  She appears as a "devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea(?) on her cheeks."

Apparently Loab persisted in a lot of the creator's work: "her combined traits are still a cohesive concept for the AI, and almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab."  And it became an obsession:

I was ripping Loab apart, and putting her back together. She is an emergent island in the latent space that we don't know how to locate with text queries. But for the AI, Loab was an equally strong point of convergence as a verbal concept. And really, it was usually stronger!

One commentator sees Loab as a historical horror moment: "I knew it was only a matter of time before someone found the first cryptid in latent space. . ."

Loab may be with us for a while:

Even when her red cheeks or other important features disappear, the "Loabness" of the images she has a hand in making is undeniable. She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI so easily optimizes toward her face.

Welcome, you terrifying creature, to the haunted internet.

The dawn of the necrobotic age

Some technological advances spring from natural inspiration. We can look to flora, fauna, and the inanimate world for all kinds of ideas.

It was only inevitable that some mad robot scientists decided to imitate spiders.

Turning dead spiders into mechanical grippers may be some people's idea of a nightmare scenario, but it could have tangible benefits. Spider legs can grip large, delicate, and irregularly shaped objects firmly and softly without breaking them. 

So, in collaboration with mechanical engineer Daniel Preston, Yap and her colleagues at Rice University discovered a way to make a dead wolf spider's legs unfurl and grip onto objects.

 

To try out the idea, the team modified dead spiders to grab each other.

Naturally, "[t]hey called this new type of robotics 'necrobotics'."

A sinkhole claims a human victim

A man perished in a sinkhole, seemingly continuing Gaia's earthly war against humanity.

The event took place in Israel, and involved a sinkhole opening up within a swimming pool:

Mobile phone video from the scene shows floaties and water being sucked to the bottom, at the center of the pool, as people sitting by the poolside shout in Hebrew. A man is seen approaching the sinkhole, slips and is almost pulled in before he backs away.

A dreadful way to die.

(thanks to Steven "No Floaties" Kaye)

A machine issues prayer from the uncanny valley

For today's holiday, we consider The Prayer. This is a Parisian art project using AI to create prayer texts, which a robot then speaks.  The robot mimics part of a person's speaking apparatus:

How does it work?

We implemented a deep neural language model (based on a pre-trained GPT2 model) that learns the probability distribution of word sequences in text corpora. The system infers word meaning and grammar rules from word distribution, by encoding this information in tensors, which are then utilized to generate natural language. The deep network is fine-tuned on sacred texts, and as such it abstracts key features from this specific genre to generate original prayers, with their peculiar lexicon and syntax. The original prayers are generated as texts and are post-processed to clean structural errors (e.g. extreme punctuation) and introduce intonation indicators, such as speed or volume variations. The resulting post-processed text is then synthesized as voice by Amazon Polly, a neural text-to-speech AI module which reads the text aloud, taking into account the intonation tags. Finally, the voice is synchronized to the lip movements, to simulate the articulation of the prayers. The prayers are the original creations of the machine.

In theoretical terms, "An experimental set-up to explore the possibilities of an approximation to celestial and numinous entities by performing a potentially never-ending chain of religious routines and devotional attempts for communication through a self-learning software."  

More:

A robot – installation operates a talking mouth that is part of a computer system to try to connect to ‘the divine’ the supernatural or ‘the noumenal’ as the mystery of ‘the unknown’, using deep learning, a method of machine learning, that attempts to mimic human brain circuits with a self learning software.

According to the conviction of most scientists within the research about artificial intelligence, robots as self-learning software running on so called neuronal networks of deep learning should in principle be able to mimic or generate any form of human consciousness even in a superior way. We want to test and explore this ability on religious experiences, thoughts and behavior with a long term experimental set up.

How would a divine epiphany appear to an artificial intelligence? The question may sound absurd but the focus of the project could maybe shed light on the difference between human and AI machines in the debate about mind and matter and reflect on the potentials and implications of deep learning AI within both its narrow setting and general state.

(via MetaFilter)

The earliest cannibalism

Researchers claim to have discovered evidence of the oldest known acts of cannibalism.  The creatures eating each other were trilobites, roughly 500 million years ago.

The paper documents damage caused by trilobites whacking and chewing on each other from different directions, then digesting the gnawed off bits.

Evidence for cannibalistic violence:

A total of 38 injured specimens exhibiting various healed cephalic and thoracic injuries are documented, in addition to the mangled remains of two individuals that probably resulted from the activities of a durophagous predator or scavenger. Specimens of both species show that most injuries are located on the posterior portion of the thorax, indicating that predators preferentially attacked from behind and/or prey individuals presented the posterior of the trunk towards the predator when threatened or fleeing. The larger sample of injured R. takooensis shows that while unilateral injuries are more common than bilateral ones, there is no evidence for a left- or right-side bias, contrasting with previous suggestions that Cambrian trilobites exhibit right-sided injury stereotypy. 

Nature: Gothic from the very start.

 

Real-life Gothic headline of the day

The American state of Ohio continues to offer real-life Gothic evidence, as seen by this story:

Man arrested while dismembering ex-girlfriend, police say

That headline actually describes the article's contents pretty clearly. 

Police responded to a domestic call Friday morning at an apartment complex in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania. ... Clifton Heights Police Chief Timothy Rockenbach says a neighbor called 911 after hearing “loud screaming” and other noises coming from the couple’s apartment....

When they went to the back of the home and looked inside, authorities say they found 32-year-old Nicholas Scurria decapitating his former girlfriend...

The world is Gothic, when you look at it the right way and at the right time.

 

New lifeforms invent new form of reproduction

The annals of horror include more than a few tales of mad science.  Some are fictional; others are not.

To begin with, scientists created life, again:

Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.

Then that life created a new way to reproduce itself:

the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms...

Download Xenobotsparentrotatingalargeballofstemcells

Naturally science took a hand:

With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.

We can leave the possibilities to the reader's imagination.  Well, with this extra detail: "The research was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency."

Sinkhole eats car in Mumbai

The Earth continued her subterranean war on the human race this week, opening a sinkhole in Mumbai and devouring a car in it.

It turns out that the water was from a well, over which people erected a concrete slab.

The residents said the building was constructed more than 80 years ago and the concrete portion around 40 years ago. It was built over a well that supplies water to the residents of Ramnivas building.

“Half of the well was covered with the concrete portion, while a part of it was kept open. Everyone parks cars there, and this is the first time that a portion of it caved in,” said [car owner] Doshi.

Check the video for the eerie ease with which Gaia consumes a human artifact.

(thanks to Steven "Moleman" Kaye)

Drones to home in on human screams

Today's Infocult headline comes from the normally staid Washington Post:

Scientists are teaching drones to hunt down human screams

The nightmarish idea is actually based on a very humane design, aimed at bringing drone help to people in emergency.

[E]ngineers at Germany’s Fraunhofer FKIE institute... built a drone prototype designed to find people by detecting human screams and listening for other signs of distress...

[Engineer] Varela says the gadget would be ideal for post-disaster scenarios, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires. They could hover over an area that rescue crews have difficulty getting to and pinpoint where people may be trapped.

The WaPo article does embrace the Gothic aspect:

If someone created a flying machine capable of tracking you down by listening for your voice, you might be creeped out...

it’s easy to imagine human-seeking drones in a sci-fi horror movie...

The author also describes a splendid Infocult scene:

Engineers at FKIE took those situations into account when building out their concept drone. They first needed a database of “impulsive” human noises to train the drone against.

They recorded themselves screaming, tapping and creating other noises that might be a sign of people in trouble. Then, they analyzed each sound frequency to find common “signatures” and used those to train artificial intelligence software.

This gives us two lessons.  First, every benign technology contains the possibility of horror.  Second, we continue to haunt every technology we make.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

 

A government official proposes cloning an ancient army

In the field of Gothic terror the subfield of mad science occupies a special place.  And few nations do mad science more boldly than Russia.

Case in point: Russian defense minister Sergey Shoygu floated the idea of cloning an ancient army.

Russia's Defense Minister has announced his plan for the DNA cloning of ancient Siberian warriors and their horses. The ancient Tunnug burial site, located in the Valley of the Kings in the Republic of Tuva in Siberia, holds the remains of 3,000-year-old Scythian warriors. Now, Sergei Shoigu, Russia's Defense Minister and one of Vladimir Putin's closest advisors, has disclosed his desire to use DNA cloning to re-create an army of noble warriors.

According to the Daily Mail:

When Shoigu, 65, initiated the Russian-Swiss archeological digs here three years ago a modern-day shaman was even drafted in by scientists to ensure the excavations did not anger the spirits.

The defence chief told a session of the Russian Geographical Society, also attended remotely by Putin, on Wednesday: 'Of course, we would like very much to find the organic matter.'

He was referring to well-preserved remains of ancient people and animals, explained TASS.

'I believe you understand what would follow that,' said Shoigu in a broadcast by Zvezda TV.

'It would be possible to make something of it, if not Dolly the Sheep.'

He added, without explaining more of planned genomic research that 'in general, it will be very interesting'.

Popular Science thinks this is just wild and unlikely.  But they do run a splendid photo of ancient Scythian remains:

Another doppelganger

From the same kind of thinking that gave us reborn dolls and boyfriend pillows comes this doppelganger concept:

 

 

One Twitter user offers this helpful amplification of the horrors:

We at Infocult are touched by this tribute to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and must leave you with a final detail:

(thanks to Jesse "Not Leatherface" Walker)

 

Another online stalker story about a predatory doppelganger

A British academic tells the story of a graduate student who tried to copy his academic work. Then his bio. Then more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(thanks to Jesse "The Real One" Walker)

A Tesla cemetery haunting

The haunted internet offered another twist today, as a driver encountered something very unsettling:

A Tesla’s collision avoidance system detects an invisible man in a cemetery

Here's a screenshot:

It's a short-short story with all kinds of resonance. Who is that man? Is he a ghost from the immediate grounds? Why can the Tesla alone sense him, and on such a sunny day?

(thanks to Ted)

Sinkhole eats forklift

Mother Earth's steady campaign against human civilization reached the American state of Pittsburgh, as a sinkhole chewed up a forklift.

(thanks to Ed "The Digging Leviathan" Webb)