For all the buzz around AI (most of it being overhyped in my own opinion) I can't deny that there are no doubt going to be a huge number of applications of it in the future. I wouldn't be participating in this research project otherwise after all.
I was working on a special kind of image-generating AI- rather than looking through drawings and such of other people, we instead fed it photographs of real life. Our goal was to create an AI which could create realistic images of things it had not seen based off other information- for example, one may be able to upload photographs of lions, and then ask for an image of a similar animal- like a tiger, if one changed some of the parameters. One of the main applications of this was to try and create accurate 3-D models of proteins based off of amino acid sequences.
There were several issues with the AI of course, but we were ironing them out. I was running a few tests, asking it to make photographs of birds making a nest, or deer drinking from a stream. Some of the images were good enough to pass for real photographs, but with many more it was clear that something was wrong, like an ear was missing or an animal had four eyes.
One day- I was getting rather bored and a thought struck me. We were asking it to create images of things it had never seen before, so why not ask it to make something that didn't exist?
I asked for a photograph of a unicorn, describing it as a horse with a horn. I got a rather hilarious result as it showed an image of a horse with a French Horn erupting from its forehead.
With a chuckle- I thought to make something even more absurd- I asked for it to make an image of God.
All I got was an 'error' message and a bunch of distorted pixels. Then again, I had only put in the word 'God' into the machine, so it likely had no idea what to do about it.
'Omnipotent being', 'that which is present everywhere', 'immortal', 'divine'- I played around with words one would use to describe god and asked the machine to try again.
At first I had trouble understanding what it was that I was seeing. The image showed a very odd figure and at first I couldn't make heads or tails of it. It had seven arms in total- three on one side and four on the other. It stood like a centaur on four limbs- though they were all human legs. It didn't seem to have a head, with a torso that ended in a stump of a neck. Its skin was a deep scarlet, and it stood in a room which was so dark that I couldn't make out the details.
I was expecting to see an old mad in the clouds, but I guessed there was some quirk with the AI which caused this. The odd number of limbs was something that was a common glitch with it, so I disregarded it. I asked it to make another image.
What surprised me at first was that the next image was very similar to the first- if you've ever used an AI you're used to difference which every image you make even if the description is the same. It still had the same number of limbs, four on one side and three on the other. It was nearly identical to the first image, but it was far closer to the 'lens' if you will, if this was an actual photograph.
I wanted it to try a third time only for something to happen which had never happened before. There was something on the 'lens' so to speak, as if someone had written something on it, or added it later with some kind of special effect. It was written in reverse though- so I had to mirror it to see what it said.
'I CAN SEE YOU'.
I nearly dropped out of my chair. I had never seen a message generated in an image before, the engine wasn't too good with letters yet and generated garbage when asked to make text, but this was very clear. "Is that... blood?" I whispered to myself as I noticed how dark the text was. My eyes drifted to a finger on one of the man hands the creature had, and I saw that it darkened, as if there was blood there.
I gulped- this had to be a mistake, right? I should've known better- I shouldn't have asked it to generate another image just to be sure.
Again, I saw a message.
'IT IS BLOOD. IT WILL BE YOURS IF YOU DO NOT STOP.'
I had seen enough. I shut down the program and went outside. That thing... though it had no face, I could feel its anger, even through the image.
I was so scared of it that I ended up clocking out of work early that day. I added 'God' to a list of words that the engine would not accept as a valid input later on, justifying it as something we should do to respect people's religious sentiments.
I hope that is enough to appease... whatever it was that I saw. I can only ask you, in case you do work with AI, to be careful of what you ask it to draw.
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