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This Halloween, the creepiest event to attend might be a mass online social experiment hosted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT is famous for churning out some of the world's top engineers, programmers, and scientists. But the university's Media Laboratory is increasingly known for launching experimental projects in October that are designed to make us squirm.
In 2016, researchers at the MIT Media Lab created the artificial-intelligence program Nightmare Machine, which converted normal photos into into macabre images. (The results were predictably creepy.) Then in 2017, a researcher made AI software called "Shelley" that learned how to write its own horror stories. (These were also creepy.)
This year, members of MIT Media Lab are taking their desire to freak us out to the next level with a project called "BeeMe."
BeeMe is described in a press release as a "massive immersive social game" that aims to "shed a new light on human potential in the new digital era." But it also sounds like a choose-your-own-adventure episode of the show "Black Mirror."
"Halloween night at 11 p.m. ET, an actor will give up their free will and let internet users control their every action," Niccolò Pescetelli, who studies collective intelligence at MIT Media Lab, told Business Insider in an email about BeeMe.
Pescetelli added: "The event will follow the story of an evil AI by the name of Zookd, who has accidentally been released online. Internet users will have to coordinate at scale and collectively help the actor (also a character in the story) to defeat Zookd. If they fail, the consequences could be disastrous."
How MIT will let you control a person
beeme internet social experiment halloween mit media labA screenshot from the website for "BeeMe," an MIT Media Lab social experiment. BeeMe/MIT Media Lab
The project's slogan is: "See what I see. Hear what I hear. Control my actions. Take my will. Be me."
The full scope of gameplay is not yet public. However, Pescetelli, BeeMe's social media accounts, and promotional materials reveal a few key details.
The person being controlled will be a trained actor, not anyone randomly selected. Who that actor will be and where they will be located won't be disclosed, Pescetelli said. He said he expects the game to last about two hours, but added "it will be the audience who ultimately decides" how long the game will go on.
There will be limits to what crowd-generated commands can make the actor do.
"Anything that violates the law or puts the actor, their privacy, or their image in danger is strictly forbidden," Pescetelli said. "Anything else is allowed. We are very curious about what [is] going to happen."
beeme internet social experiment halloween vote command mit media labA scene from the trailer for "BeeMe," an MIT Media Lab social experiment.BeeMee/MIT Media Lab
Participants will control the actor through a web browser, in two ways.
One is by writing in and submitting custom commands, such as "make coffee," "open the door," "run away," and so on. The second way is by voting up or down on those commands, similar to the system used by Reddit. Once a command is voted to the top, the actor will presumably do that very thing.
This is the origin of the word "bee" in the project's name: Internet users will have to act collectively as a "hive" to progress through the game.
BeeMe's Twitter account shared an eerie teaser video of the game on October 15.
"Many people have played an augmented reality game, but BeeMe is reality augmented," Pescetelli said in a press release. "In BeeMe an agent gives up their free will to save humanity — or perhaps to know whether humanity can be saved at all. This brave individual will agree to let the Internet pilot their every action."
The whole event will be broadcast live at beeme.online. |
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| Fergie |
I'm a big online everything. But for me, shopping online started with music, obviously, then it went onto books, meditation CDs, and I just recently bought these electronic cigarettes. My husband is trying to quit smoking, so I went online and I bought those BluCigs cigarettes in every flavor for him. |