The images and videos that artificial intelligence spits out are the product of our own culture, remixed and amplified. On the one hand they play with our collective subconscious, on the other they evoke feelings of restlessness and a horror body aesthetic where the machines are decomposing human bodies. Thus the meta-horror of the AI takes shape.
“I forgot to tell you about a strange nightmare that I made,” Sara says by placing the coffee on the table. It is a colleague of mine, we are having breakfast and begins to describe in detail a strange dream made last night. “We were all in the office and a certain point the lights go out, this strange monster comes to meet me,” he says, “he had vitrei eyes and the white face that changed continuously and deformed”. Stops. “Like, as in the videos of artificial intelligence” Very recognizable horror aesthetics.
Anyone who tried to play with a generator IA at some point found themselves in front of strange images. Plastic expressions, hands with seven fingers, faces that melt, legs with the wrong place. These machines errors in the generation process restless us. And not only because they are linked to adistressing aesthetics, there is in fact an ambiguity ontological, That is, the uncertainty about the origin and essence of the images and videos created with the IA.
We are faced with one primitive network of digital neurons that spits out monsters. The images and videos that artificial intelligence creates are the product of our own culture, remixed, amplified and broken. On the one hand they play with our collective subconscious, on the other they evoke feelings of restlessness and a horror body aesthetic where however it is the machines that break down human bodies. Thus takes shape The meta-horror of the AI. To frighten us are not simply the results but the process, the software are in fact Active agents of creation. And if even artificial intelligence does not know fear, he knows perfectly how to make it try it.
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The collective subconscious of artificial intelligence
There is a reason if artificial intelligence monsters move a different form of restlessness. Second Carl Gustav Jung Horror works because “he draws on primordial archetypes buried in depth in our collective subconscious “. With the training of the machines, which use millions of data recovered from the web, The collective subconscious has never been so easy to reach.
Many horror clips to inspiration from online aesthetics such as Weirdcore to evoke feelings of anxiety and disturbing images that They are part of the Internet DNA. Artificial intelligence therefore becomes a technological substrate on a human basis which deforms collective fears, reflecting on the interface of the mirror world chatbot. It therefore seems to draw on a human subconscious that we have not yet understood. Thus becomes the unknown of the unknown.
The evolution of UNCANNY VALLEY
Despite the training of “human” origin, the artificial element persists. And in fact the aesthetics of the AI is more considered the next step of theUncanny Valley: that feeling of discomfort that we feel in front of robots too similar to humans. The term was coined in the 70s by Masahiro Mori. According to the robotic professor, when something artificial takes on too human traits a negative psychological reaction, a form of repulsion moved by a sense of restlessness.
Before even, in 1906, the German psychiatrist Ernst jntsch In his essay “regarding the psychology of the disturbing” he had analyzed the phenomenon. For Jentsch the disturbing is a feeling of uncertainty triggered by the distrust in accepting something that is not familiar. The generative have passed this border. They create human bodies with imperceptibly wrong proportions. Perfect faces, but with An empty look, or hands with six fingers.
The Horror of the logical nonsense
To amplify the restlessness of UNCANNY VALLEY is the compromised logic. IA generators often produce visually coherent compositions but with Elements out of place. The brain looks for a sense, and does not find it. This disorientation generates discomfort. It is a new type of semiotic horrorwho does not need blood or monsters. Embodies what Mark Fisher defines “Weird” in the essay “The Weird and the Eeire”, is what It does not belong to this world, but it still appears in it.
As the masters of horror teach ambiguity is very precious. A blurred figure, a shadow in the wrong place, a scene interrupted in half, they are elements force our brain to fill the voids, often evoking Something even more frightening.
Mutation and horror body
There is an undisputed protagonist in horror images created by artificial intelligence: the human body. Ventri who melted, legs out of place, mouths that split the faces, marching skin, fingers. The bodies generated by the AI often they seem in mutation, unstable and post-human. The horror moves thus from the “monster” towards a disordered biology: meat, skin, fabrics that are not where they should.
The images to the often flow into body horror for a very simple reason: the human is among the most represented elements online. Yet the IA “does not understand” what a coherent body is, but it assembles it based on recurring patterns in the data. Tends to treat the skin, muscles, bones like Plastic or modular materialsto recombin. In this way The human body becomes an artificial assemblya collage of meat. It looks like an extension of the horror body of David Cronenbergwe think of the mutant bodies in Videodrome or The Fly, but with A digital coldness.
Many images made with artificial intelligence show Disturbing repetitions of human traits: too many eyes, too many mouths, too many hands. This mechanism evokes the abject – a psychological reaction of refusal and disgust towards what violates the boundaries of identity and order – described by Julia Kristevaa central concept in body horror. The body thus becomes the new battlefield for the horror of the machines. And if the human body, for the IA, is only a texture, when it is wrong, It reminds us how fragile we are.
Meta-horror: we are the nightmare
IA generates fear not only in content, but in his being active agent of creation. The horror is not only in the result but, above all, in the process. Because we are the inputs – at least for now – of each image created with artificial intelligence, but, beyond the prompt that we use, the product (whether for lack of details or for hallucinations of the machine) is something that We only recognize in part. Not only that. The IA tends to generate disturbing images, even when not explicitly requested, especially when the prompt is vague. This “error” is due to the “Latent Space Contamination“, That is, the presence of visual associations (e.g. deformed faces, fused arts, multiple eyes) learned during training.
To give us an answer we have to return to the origin, to the training, therefore to humans. The horror of the software teaches us that we are the nightmare. The machines are distorted mirrors. They learn from us, from our collective unconscious images, stories, archetypes. And if we are afraid, perhaps, it is also because We don’t like what we see reflection. To mention Fisher: “The horror is not in the appearance of the disturbing, but in recognizing that The disturbing has always been within us“.”
