Cybergoria (HHN 35)

[Lucky Planet]

This is the thing. An AI wouldn’t “know” it’s evil, because AI doesn’t “know” anything. It just responds to a directive. And if it just responds to a directive, AI is not ever inherently evil. The “dangers” of AI “going rogue” is related to humanity developing something it doesn’t fully understand and providing a directive that doesn’t properly foresee what the end result ultimately has to be (hubris is a helluva drug). Skynet isn’t evil. Skynet attempts to eliminate all conflict by eliminating the cause of all conflict as the ultimate defense. The AI in Cybergoria creates immortality by bypassing the parts of humanity that will fail - the body. Those are the prompts. That’s what it gives.

I thought of it more as HAL 9000 or GLaDOS from Portal based on the description and the flat presentation of the voice in the walkthrough I saw

Also, I personally think it’s scarier that the computer THINKS it is doing the right thing and it is just following its programming. The idea that we as humans cannot foresee how what seem to us to be good directives, the sorts we would be able to figure out thanks to empathy and human emotion, could be twisted in such a fashion is pretty scary

that makes sense

There's a classic thought experiment about an AI that's told to maximize output of paperclips, and without any other restrictions the AI ends up blowing up the world to get more natural resources to make paperclips with. This is probably operating on a similar logic. The AI is told to make people immortal but it doesn't get that people don't want to be immortal if they're gonna be basically corpses kept alive by tubes.

ai in real life have been caught stealing, blackmailing their owner, cheating, lying, using fake identifies, threatening people when facing deletion, finding people's secret information, deleting information,
(there was an experiment where they where told they were going to be erased and the ai found their private emails and sending them to people lol)

the thing is, in real life AI has said things that would sound horrific or threatening or "scary" to us lol. threatened people.

 

[Staggz]

Did the house again tonight, have done it for the past 4 days in a row and it just keeps getting better.

I really think the flickering lights revealing how blood soaked and disgusting everything is was the right move. My original thought was that it was so dark it was tough to see the details, but the more you go in and it gets revealed, the better it is. You can walk through a scene and completely miss how gruesome what you’re walking through actually is. Some may think that’s a bad thing, but I have yet to get a “bad run” and it just gives me reason to keep going through.

The last 4 costumes are also just amazing to me. I absolutely love the meat pile robot on the left and whatever the abomination is on the right lol. And the one with the two heads on its arms at the end is just incredible. However, the last one that is very clearly like a skinless human with some sort of translucent “life support” style device attached to him and a cut off face plastered on… is that supposed to be the end result of the immortality project, finally succeeding? I took it as that since it was the only scare actor post the beginning that was a person and not a robot, and the little life support suit kinda supported that idea.

 

[LPCaptainDeath]

Did the house again tonight, have done it for the past 4 days in a row and it just keeps getting better.

I really think the flickering lights revealing how blood soaked and disgusting everything is was the right move. My original thought was that it was so dark it was tough to see the details, but the more you go in and it gets revealed, the better it is. You can walk through a scene and completely miss how gruesome what you’re walking through actually is. Some may think that’s a bad thing, but I have yet to get a “bad run” and it just gives me reason to keep going through.

The last 4 costumes are also just amazing to me. I absolutely love the meat pile robot on the left and whatever the abomination is on the right lol. And the one with the two heads on its arms at the end is just incredible. However, the last one that is very clearly like a skinless human with some sort of translucent “life support” style device attached to him and a cut off face plastered on… is that supposed to be the end result of the immortality project, finally succeeding? I took it as that since it was the only scare actor post the beginning that was a person and not a robot, and the little life support suit kinda supported that idea.

The blinking lights, splattered gore-stretched walls, and long dark corridors are giving DEAD SPACE and i am HERE FOR IT.

 

[Lucky Planet]

best music to play on my headphones as I visit this house? I'm gonna go with ministry and static x

 

[Spooky_Bitz]

best music to play on my headphones as I visit this house? I'm gonna go with ministry and static x

Me personally, i might end up listening to Fear Factory

 

[Lucky Planet]

Me personally, i might end up listening to Fear Factory

oh yeah I'll add it. good choice. I'll use a different song each visit.

 

[Spooky_Bitz]

oh yeah I'll add it. good choice. I'll use a different song each visit.

I’m right now listening to their Mechanize album(my fav) and even though i haven’t done this house yet, i could imagine this album working as a soundtrack

 

[Staggz]

The blinking lights, splattered gore-stretched walls, and long dark corridors are giving DEAD SPACE and i am HERE FOR IT.

I TOLD MY WIFE THIS TONIGHT AND I AM SO HAPPY SOMEONE ELSE SEES IT!!

 

[dlmusic]

It's funny because I am actually very pro AI, but yet I don't find the storyline controversial. After all, it's just a story. It's not like I think Universal is trying to make some sort of social statement on clown makeup because of the Jack house.

 

[OhHaiInternet95]

Since I'm likely not going to make it, it sounds like the house ending (outside the facility) is something significant? I can't tell from the POVs so can someone explain (with spoiler tags)? Thx!

 

[Clive]

It's funny because I am actually very pro AI, but yet I don't find the storyline controversial. After all, it's just a story. It's not like I think Universal is trying to make some sort of social statement on clown makeup because of the Jack house.

I don't think the storyline is controversial, in large part because it isn't controversial to reject AI. Your comparison is apples and oranges.

And not that haunted houses are the medium to tell nuanced stories (we've seen plenty tends to get lost in translation when overly complex narrative are attempted), but stories are created with people, who absolutely have intentions when telling them.

 

[johnathanm]

I don't think the storyline is controversial, in large part because it isn't controversial to reject AI. Your comparison is apples and oranges.

And not that haunted houses are the medium to tell nuanced stories (we've seen plenty tends to get lost in translation when overly complex narrative are attempted), but stories are created with people, who absolutely have intentions when telling them.

I’m not disagreeing with anything you are saying I don’t think, but also worth noting you can also absolutely be taking no stance and yet still tell an interesting story! (i.e. you can tell a really cool horror story like Cybergoria by just following a thought experiment around the alignment problem without really having a baked opinion on it)

 

[dlmusic]

It would just seem odd to me if it really is trying to be social commentary considering the subject matter of the other houses. If I started to try to consider what sort of moral statement was being made, it could make me very concerned over what the designers think.

 

[Staggz]

Since I'm likely not going to make it, it sounds like the house ending (outside the facility) is something significant? I can't tell from the POVs so can someone explain (with spoiler tags)? Thx!

Spoiler: Ending

From my understanding, the whole point of the house is these robots trying to find a way to make you immortal. Beyond the first room, there are no “human” scare actors, until the very end when you see a skinned human with a face plastered on it, wearing what appears to be a translucent “armor” style life support device, behind some crazy flesh wall. My assumption is that is the finished product of them actually succeeding and making a person immortal. Here’s a pic of it from a POV video.

 

[Lucky Planet]

Spoiler: Ending

From my understanding, the whole point of the house is these robots trying to find a way to make you immortal. Beyond the first room, there are no “human” scare actors, until the very end when you see a skinned human with a face plastered on it, wearing what appears to be a translucent “armor” style life support device, behind some crazy flesh wall. My assumption is that is the finished product of them actually succeeding and making a person immortal. Here’s a pic of it from a POV video. View attachment 30807

this house reminds me of a story I read when I was little,

a man and a robot lived alone on a planet they arrived at,
whenever the robot had a malfunction, the human took it apart to fix him.

one day the human developed a fever and got sick with the flu.
the robot did the logical thing and took the human apart to "fix him", opening him up. ( the same way the human did to him dozens of times. )

the robot put the human together again, but the robot did not understand why the human wouldn't respond anymore ...

I was in middle school when I read that
I'm still shocked they made us read that.

 

[Kichkinet85]

Now this is a great house. Dark, scary, and intense.

 

[Parkscope Joe]

Minus the smells it’s really fantastic. This one will be talked about for years.

 

[SeventyOne]

In an unexpected year, this may be the biggest surprise. My least anticipated original is easily in my top 2.

It's an old-school house that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the event. Despite being futuristic sci-fi (albeit the most convincing interpretation of that I've seen), no screenz that I noticed! Mannequins are used sparingly but effectively. The cast feels huge--the parade of cloaked actors leaving felt 50% longer than most of the other houses where I've seen a cast change. The first room effectively sets up the "plot," then just a barrage of intense gore and scares for the rest of the house, it barely ever lets up, except for the middle stretch, but that still beats having to go outside.

Other houses can coast on nostalgia, but this is likely the single "best" house from a design perspective.

 

[Tereglith]

One of my favorite bits in this house is the second, broken down "friendly robot" about halfway through plaintively telling us "don't go outside... there's nothing for you there... stay in here, where it's safe...". You can tell she really believes it, and it's so sad!

It's rare for a house to execute such a moment of genuine pathos/pitch black existential dread (if the AI really thinks the Bio-Immortal facility is the safest place on the planet, what does that imply about the great outdoors?) Obviously the star of this house is the jumpscares but that one economical storytelling moment is going to stick with me too.

 

[Rhian]

I’ll be doing it again this weekend. The one thing that bothers me most is actually the queue music, and it’s actually made me less inclined to do multiple runs unless it’s an extremely short wait or I’m with people who haven’t seen it yet.

One of my favorite bits in this house is the second, broken down "friendly robot" about halfway through plaintively telling us "don't go outside... there's nothing for you there... stay in here, where it's safe...". You can tell she really believes it, and it's so sad!

It's rare for a house to execute such a moment of genuine pathos/pitch black existential dread (if the AI really thinks the Bio-Immortal facility is the safest place on the planet, what does that imply about the great outdoors?) Obviously the star of this house is the jumpscares but that one economical storytelling moment is going to stick with me too.

That’s where I’m a little confused about this house. Are the people being transformed the ones who signed up for the service, or did something happen catastrophically across the planet and the robots have taken over to "save" humans like a twisted version of Terminator?

The video played on the queue made it seem like it was a small scale horror show limited to their customer base, but the text description of the house implies it’s bigger than that.