Our feeds are flooded with AI-generated fakes, surreal characters, and viral nightmares. In this uncanny digital age, Eylul Bombaci shows how AI doesn’t just mirror our fears, it creates new ones, from the Crungus monster to rats overrunning London.
Photo: Canva
Every day, something new is added to the AI-flavoured horror series, meanwhile, AI also produces its own mystical horror character. While AI-generated videos made just to go viral keep flooding our algorithms, we find ourselves discussing a storm of misinformation in visuals and the rise of AI-created horror characters.
With its growing use, artificial intelligence is rapidly flooding our social media feeds. Let me know if you’d like a more playful or formal tone!. Now, while watching reels, at least three out of 10 videos are false information or visuals, while the real comes together with the artificial. Minds are confused. Now, at the point where artificial intelligence has reached in image production, your friend can knock on your door saying, “London has been invaded by rats”. While something new is added to the AI-flavoured horror series every day, artificial intelligence also produces its own mystical horror character. This is how the “crungus monster” that artificial intelligence produces on its own is born. Videos produced by artificial intelligence just to go viral keep dominating our algorithms, as we discuss the flood of false information in visuals and the eerie characters created by AI.
A brief history
2021 was truly a revolutionary year for visual AI production tools. Right at the beginning of that year, the research laboratory OpenAI offered its interface called Dall-E to users in a limited way. Thereupon, in 2022, profile photos made with platforms using an open source interface called Stable Diffusion, such as Lensa, made things bigger. Dall-E mini, which was later renamed Craiyon, opened its doors to those who did not have access to Dall-E, which OpenAI offered in a limited way. Craiyon, although weaker than Dall-E, still continued to offer quite impressive content. This entertaining but also fearful technology due to suspicions of misinformation, has become a part of our lives whether we want it or not. Video clips made with AI (see Ezhel, Murda and Bugy’s ‘Uchigatana’), [1]advertisements and news posters, as well as many contents such as the Harry Potter crew going to a rave in Berlin, have become a part of social media. Now, AI content production has spread to business areas and social media tools, as well as to those who are interested.
Collages, hybrids and surrealism
Although artificial intelligence is one of the most heavily invested sectors of our time, it has also sparked fears like ‘It’s going to take over humanity!’ Maybe we have a little more time to take artificial intelligence so seriously. Because it has not even managed to produce an image of wine overflowing from its glass.
One of the biggest reasons for this is that the working capacity of artificial intelligence tools works by diffusing the images and then putting the tiny collages back together. In other words, artificial intelligence cannot easily imagine something that does not exist in its interface, but it can take things apart and put them back together. Dall-E actually got its name from here. This name, which is a mixture of Disney’s famous robot character “Wall-E” and surrealist artist Salvador Dali, combines a movie about the dystopian life of humanity, as well as the following words of Dali: “Those who cannot imitate anything, cannot produce anything.” In other words, just like AI, this is a saying that underlines the inspiration that ‘human’ artists also get from imitation.
The first monster of artificial intelligence: Crungus
Twitch streamer and voice artist Guy Kelly started writing various meaningless words on Craiyon and came up with the word “Crungus”. Thus, the unique monster of artificial intelligence emerged. This dark character, which looks a bit like an ogre, has been dubbed the first cryptic monster of artificial intelligence by Twitter users. It has not been possible to find a visual reflection of this word, which does not go beyond a few terms in the Urban Dictionary, anywhere else until now. As Kelly said, a word he invented for no reason caused artificial intelligence to create a mystical character.
Uncanny AI
What you will see now is perhaps even more disturbing than Crungus. It is a product of artificial intelligence being able to blend everything you can imagine. We have reached a world where the most “weird” things, such as chickens on trucks, animals dancing in clubs, and rats raiding London, have overcome the algorithm and come across us. In this world, neither artificial intelligence nor imagination has any limits. Therefore, what we come across is the word “uncanny”, which has become popular recently. We can claim that some of those who produce this content push the boundaries of creativity. However, a large portion of them are simply aiming to reach the highest levels in this uncertain game called the algorithm and get the most clicks.
Dazed Magazine writer Günseli Yalcinkaya explains the source of the word Uncanny as follows: “In his 1919 article “The Uncanny,” Freud defines this word as “a manifestation of recurring frightening thoughts that lie in our consciousness, repressed by our ego, but are unfamiliar to us.” In 1968, Jung said that the reason horror movies are popular is because they “tap into primitive archetypes buried deep in our collective subconscious.” Today, it has never been easier to access the collective subconscious. In the underground data network that makes up the Internet, in the Cloud, and in the AI training data that conjures up such monsters. AI is a technological subconscious that literally hallucinates our collective dreams, fears, and anxieties and reflects them back to us in the form of fictional mirror worlds. It’s no wonder we see so many horrors emerging from the shadows.”
Meta, fact-checking, misinformation
This collective fear is causing eye-catching false information and visuals produced by artificial intelligence to go viral and spread around on social media. In this period when these visuals are increasing and the Instagram reels section is increasingly filled with AI-intensified fear content, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, the parent company of Instagram, announced that he is withdrawing his investments in fact checking and will switch to the “community notes” system used by Twitter. In this system, instead of fact-checking experts, users are the watchdogs of the accuracy of the content. While experts are trying to understand Zuckerberg’s motivation behind this decision, social media is overflowing with chickens that look like dogs. Where are we going? We will all see together.
This article has been translated from Dergy Magazine. To see the original article in Turkish, click on this link.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5eSot0pcz0