Purely Cursed: 22 AI Images You Can Never Unsee (23 photos)

Artificial intelligence can do a lot: write poetry, translate languages, and recognize faces. But sometimes, AI takes a break from being useful and just goes completely off the rails. Web users from around the globe have gathered images generated in response to totally ordinary prompts—only for the AI to spew out something no sane human could ever imagine. From a chicken-cockroach hybrid and an elephant-trunked lion to a bizarrely posed massage and a woman whose skin looks like... well, see for yourself. Here's what happens when AI takes matters into its own digital hands.







A trypophobe's worst nightmare.





This is how the Terminator saga could have ended.



Here's what the AI came up with for "a typical American family."



An AI designed a promo site for a massage parlor. Exactly what is happening to the client remains open to interpretation.



A chicken-cockroach hybrid. The AI clearly read the wrong biology textbooks.



Nobody asked for a chicken with human teeth. The AI threw them in out of the kindness of its heart—free of charge.



An extended scene from Alien 3 (1992): the AI rewrote the ending Director David Fincher definitely never envisioned.



AI was tasked with generating realistic women. Something went horribly wrong this time.



Prompt: "Show a man violently turning into a spoon in a shopping mall."



A cross between a lion and an elephant.



A horse with a microscopic head—or no head at all. Anatomy according to AI.



Never let yourself be made of cake.



The assignment: "generate an image that makes you break out in a cold sweat." Mission accomplished.



A hybrid portrait of Greta Thunberg and Jim Carrey.



Cats always land on their feet. The AI tested this theory under conditions best left untried.



A nightmare creation. Hands with toothy mouths for fingers—good luck getting that out of your head.



AI's take on "American Psycho" (2000). Patrick Bateman definitely took a different turn here.



"They grow up so fast."



Prompt: "hallucinate and create a cursed image." The AI really went all out.



A new spa offering a hissing cockroach massage. A tourist tried it while vacationing in Asia—and shared the photo evidence.



"Things out of place." Bob costs $4.99. What Bob actually is remains a mystery.



"An accurate illustration of what goes on in my head 90 percent of the time."