The Horror Prompt

Fiction

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”. -Leonardo da Vinci

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” -Albert Einstein

I’ve been experimenting with pastels. This was my most recent attempt. Find out more about him in the story below.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that there isn’t anything else I can do. The update is already live. It’s been live for twenty minutes. We’re too late is all. That thing’s out there and I don’t think there’s any stopping it.

YES! Yes, I know it’s killed twenty-seven people. Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course I feel terrible. I feel horrible, but it’s not our fault. I really don’t understand why you—and what looks like the entire IT department from the Sunnyvale Police Department—are here boxing up our computers. We had nothing to do with this.

Look. I’ve told you. I’m aware our generative art AI was somehow involved in that massacre, but that’s incidental. It’s not like we trained the AI to be a killer.

Oh. Really? You’re going there? Look. You’ve got our servers. You’ve got our code. Have your tech guys review it. They’ll tell you that Chiaroscuro is in no way organized to be violent, malevolent, or anything of the sort. It just remixes images to create art. That’s all we do and I resent your implications that we’re somehow responsible for the deaths of those girls.

We’re the good guys here. When we launched Chiaroscuro our goal was to democratize the creation of art. We quite literally made true, unfettered creativity available to everyone. Can’t draw? Can’t paint? We removed those barriers.

The creation of art is no longer the sole province of the skilled craftsman. Ability and manual dexterity are no longer required. If you’re literate enough to create a simple language prompt then you can create stunning images in the style of your favorite classical artist or any of the licensed artworks from our thousands of living creators. That’s what Chiaroscuro does.

It does not kill teen-aged girls!

I’m sorry. What’s your name? Officer Palomino? Sure. I’ll answer your questions about code. The faster this is cleared up the more quickly you guys can put manpower on the streets hunting that thing down… okay, yeah. Sorry. I just really think you guys are wasting your time talking to me.

This is a little technical, but the way our algorithm works is that the AI is given a natural language prompt. Then, it will scour our data set for images that match that prompt and then it uses a series of iterative attempts to match the prompt while comparing its results to the original source images or whatever other considerations may be in the prompt. By combining several of these it reaches an average that most closely matches the intended result. We then use noise filters… too much? Sorry. I can save that for your tech guys.

I think maybe the problem was with the averaging. Or… our data set? I don’t understand how that could be. Frankly, I’m not sure anyone can explain it. Maybe the fault was in the prompts?

I admit that I never imagined that people would task our AI with the creation of a demon or that the AI would approach the work so literally. The system was never designed to manifest anything but imagery.

What are you doing? Please don’t. I’ve seen the footage several times. I don’t want to see it again. Have you talked to their parents at all? I mean why were they using Chiaroscuro in the first place? That’s something you should look into Detective Palomino. Teen girls are supposed to be playing Bloody Mary in the bathroom not creating generative art using an AI.

Yes. I’m aware of what happens five minutes into the video. No. Please! Detective, I’ve told you I don’t want to see this again. Oh. You haven’t seen that part of the video yet. Okay. I guess I can show it to you. All of your colleagues have seen it. Just promise me you won’t go past seven minutes.

All right, it’s coming up. Pay attention to this next part. You can hear Meagan or Mary or whoever reads the prompt aloud as her friend types it in: “Eldritch demon from the forsaken realms.”

Did you hear that? That’s why I think the problem was the prompt. Our data set didn’t include references to the eldritch demons or forsaken realms. So, the AI did what all AIs do, it tried to solve the task that it had been given. Over and over. It’s called a generative adversarial network. It’s kind of like two competing networks that train one another over and over again. They compare their results against the discriminator model until they reach consensus that the result is in line with the ‘real’ image. This goes on for thousands, hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions of times. I’d have to check the logs to give you a definitive answer…

Training the networks with large datasets is almost embarrassingly parallel work, and we’ve optimized our hardware around that. We’d just finished gone live with several hundred more cloud servers to help handle all of the processing. What I’m saying is that I knew our systems were fast, but I had no idea that they could handle that kind of bandwidth.

At some point in its quest for a solution, our AI abandoned our datasets and began scraping the internet looking for clues and approaches that could be used to visualize an eldritch demon from the forsaken realms.

There! Pause the video right there. You can see it on the girl’s glasses. No. Not her. The one who is typing. Look. It’s right there. It only appears for a fraction of a second. I swear that’s Akkadian. It’s a dead language. Hasn’t been spoken in… well, I don’t know.

No. Of course I’m not blaming the victim here, but it was kind of her fault. I mean our AI just complied with her request. We went over this with the other detectives before you got here, but if you advance this frame by frame you’ll see snatches of what they think are Sanskrit and a couple more early Mediterranean languages. To my knowledge, we don’t have images in our dataset that include any words from those languages. That’s why I know the AI had expanded outside of the dataset we trained it on… which is why the problem wasn’t with our AI at all. It’s all because of a bad prompt.

I don’t know what those girls saw during that instant, but my guess is the screen was flashing through all of the possible matches for that term. The AI was exploring different models as it evaluated the best way to comply with the stated goal. Whatever happened next is beyond the scope of creating an image… unless maybe old customs and traditions taught that images could evoke the supernatural?

Okay, man. That’s enough. Stop the video. I won’t watch it happen again.”

Just then, my cell phone rang. I glanced at the detective who nodded that I could answer. I turned away from the video. Palomino was going to watch it again. I took a couple of steps away because I didn’t want whoever was calling me to hear the screams from the video.

“Uh… hello?”

“Jesse! Are you seeing this? They’re coming out of…” There was a loud thud followed by a ripping sound. The line went dead.

I’d barely pulled the phone from my ear when I heard a scream behind me. Apparently, he’d reached that part of the video. I turned to see Detective Palomino still seated in front of the monitor watching as that thing went about its work of turning that bedroom into an abattoir.

The detective winced as the demon finished the last victim. Then, something different happened. In earlier viewings the demon had dissipated, but this time it looked right at the camera. It looked right at the detective. It raised an unnaturally elongated arm and reached for the detective. Slowly, the fingers passed through the panel of the monitor’s screen until the full arm was extending out of the monitor. It grabbed the detective and raised him in the air. While I watched the detective spat blood and gurgled his dying breath. Then, slowly and methodically what can only be described as a dark monstrosity crawled out of the monitor… and then, it turned its gaze to me.

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
-Pablo Picasso