In a world where artificial intelligence makes music, generates visual art, and assists with tasks from homework help to workplace tasks, machines are quickly becoming embedded in everyday life. These intelligent systems have not only increased convenience, but also sparked intense debate, raising questions around issues of control, fairness and abuse.
While some see these tools as innovations, others fear they could deepen existing power imbalances and even perpetuate social inequality. Among these concerns, many people take comfort in one assumption: machines lack emotions.
Yet recent developments in language-based AI suggest that machines are moving closer to convincingly imitating human emotions, leading us to question our emotional connection to the technology we rely on.
Participate in the ‘Spook the Machine’ experiment, a creative and scientific Halloween project developed by the Center for Humans and Machines, aimed at exploring the emotional dynamics between humans and machines in a new way. This interactive experiment encourages participants to explore the concept of fear – especially machine-specific fears – to gain new insight into how humans and machines relate.
“Emotions are a fundamental part of human communication,” says Levin Brinkmann, a scientific researcher involved in the project. “Even though machines don’t have emotions, they can be trained to show them, making communication with us more effective.”
The project challenges users to use AI with carefully crafted creepy images to evoke specific ‘fears’, pushing the boundaries of what AI can mimic in terms of emotional responses.
Participants in the Spook the Machine experiment are given an unusual task: uncovering a unique phobia embedded in each AI. These phobias are inspired by clearly machine-like fears, such as ‘Obsolescia’, the fear of being replaced by more advanced technology, or ‘Deletophobia’, the fear of losing data and memory.
These fears highlight vulnerabilities that, while fictional for machines, resonate with many of the underlying insecurities humans experience in an increasingly automated world. The AI’s responses to the creepy clues, designed through specific text input, allow users to explore a side of the technology they rarely consider: its hypothetical emotional weaknesses.
The interactive nature of this project adds a playful dimension to the Halloween season. By instilling “fear” in machines, Spook the Machine allows humans to connect with AI on an unexpected emotional level, opening up new ways to think about our evolving relationship with intelligent systems.
Reflecting on this shift, Brinkmann adds: “We often think of machines as being cold and without emotional weaknesses, but it is a fascinating question whether giving machines ’emotional’ weaknesses can change the way we interact with them. ” The experiment not only provides a new Halloween challenge, but also serves as a medium through which participants can question and understand the role of AI in society in a deeper way.
In addition to entertainment, Spook the Machine invites critical reflection on what it means to provide machines with perceived emotions and how that influences our cultural norms. Iyad Rahwan, director of the Center for Humans and Machines and leading figure behind the project, points to the creative tension between human and machine imagination.
“Machines can create artifacts, such as synthetic images,” Rahwan explains, “but an essential part of cultural evolution is humans deciding what is interesting in creative processes. Here we flip the script and ask: what happens when machines decide what is interesting or creative? In this case, they will tell us what is scariest.”
Rahwan, known for his previous work on AI-focused Halloween projects like the Nightmare Machine and Shelley, an AI horror story generator, is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of human-machine interaction. Spook the Machine builds on the expertise of its team, with the aim of tapping into the emotional dimension of human interaction with AI.
The experiment also taps into the evolving emotional connections between humans and machines by challenging participants to imagine a machine’s hypothetical fears and create creepy images to “scare” the AI. This role reversal – where humans provoke an emotional response from machines – reveals how machines, even though devoid of real feelings, can still act as mirrors, reflecting human creativity and cultural norms back to us.
Rahwan sees this experiment as a way to explore how, as machines become more common, people may begin to view them through an emotional lens, even if those emotions are manufactured.
Spook the Machine is open to participants through January 7, 2025, allowing plenty of time for AI enthusiasts and Halloween enthusiasts to test their skills and share their results online. The challenge is both an artistic endeavor and a scientific investigation, attracting the attention of people curious about the creative potential of AI.
As Rahwan suggests, projects like these give us a glimpse of the future of human-machine interaction, where the role of technology extends beyond pure functionality to become an interactive and sometimes uncanny extension of the human experience.
