Watch a haunting MIT program transform photos into your worst nightmares

The smarter artificial intelligence (AI) software gets, the more fearful the world's brightest contemporary minds seem to grow.

SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said in 2014 that "we're summoning the demon" with the technology. And just last week Stephen Hawking, during the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, also stumped on his trepidation of ever-powerful computer algorithms.

"In short, the rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity," Hawking said. "We do not yet know which."

Preying on these fears, three researchers at MIT Media Lab took a page from "Black Mirror" and created the Nightmare Machine.

"We know that AI terrifies us in the abstract sense. But we wondered: [...] can AI elicit more powerful visceral reactions more akin to what we see in a horror movie?" Pınar Yanardağ, a data scientist and member of the project, told Business Insider in an email. "That is, can AI creatively imagine things that we find terrifying?"

Here's how the team developed its scary software, plus some images and animations of it at work.