Artificial Intelligence Creates Creepy Donald Trump Images With MIT's 'Nightmare Machine'

Donald Trump's inauguration is looming before us and he claims that he will "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" while also unifying a divided nation. So far his presidency has seemed to make the country more partisan, not less. But after today (well, after he has the w/end off) the most powerful man in the world will get down to work.

Perhaps just as terrifying as a Trump presidency might appear to many progressives, is these terrifying nightmare fuel images created by MIT using deep learning algorithms. From images of Trump to images of the White House and other global landmarks, MIT have added an unnerving strangeness to the pics by casting them through the gaze of a machine.

It's part of MIT's project Nightmare Machine and is an attempt to see if artificial intelligence can scare the crap out of us. The video of Donald Trump (above) is testament to that.

They've done this by using deep learning algorithms (including Google's Deep Dream) which are designed to create frightening images by identifying what makes something creepy. They then apply those traits to people's faces, film stills, or to landmarks from across the globe.

"We use state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to learn how haunted houses, or toxic cities look like. Then, we apply the learnt style to famous landmarks and present you: AI-powered horror all over the world!" says the project's website.

The results can be seen both on their website and Instagram account. Not all the images created by the algorithms are terrifying though (or maybe you think none of them are) so the project is asking the public to vote on what ones they think are scary, so the AI can learn from that.

"Quantifying what is scary is not an easy problem, let alone describing it to an algorithm," Iyad Rahwan, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, told Motherboard. "This is precisely why machine learning is useful here, because we can show the algorithm a picture of something scary, and ask it to learn those scary features on its own."

Although the project is a bit of fun, Rahwan says that the goal is to "understand the barriers between human and machine cooperation."

Check out some of the images below. And head to the project's website or Instagram for more.