---
title: "Watch an AI Die, Neuron by Neuron"
description: "An artist created a neural network and programmed it to generate a human-looking face. She then had the AI forget it, neuron by neuron."
date: "2019-06-04"
modified: "2019-06-04"
authors:
  - name: "Kristin Houser"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/kristin"
url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/watch-ai-die-neural-network"
categories:
  - "Artificial Intelligence"
tags:
  - "art"
  - "creative ai"
  - "neural network"
  - "the digest"
---

# Watch an AI Die, Neuron by Neuron

![An artist created a neural network and programmed it to generate a human-looking face. She then had the AI forget it, neuron by neuron.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/watch-ai-die-neural-network.png>)
*\<em\>Image: AI Told Me via Vimeo/Victor Tangermann\</em\>*

## Death of AI

We now know what it looks like when a neural network dies.

This strange new experience is courtesy of an artist who identified herself only as "the girl who talks to AI" in an [email to *Vice*](<https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evym4m/ai-told-me-human-face-neural-networks>). For a recent project titled "What I saw before the darkness," she programmed an artificial intelligence to generate a human-looking face, then shut off its own neurons one at a time — a process she recorded and shared in a time-lapse video.

https://vimeo.com/337909277

## Face Off

The "death" of the neural network is downright unsettling.

What starts as a normal-looking face slowly takes on strange glitches — lines shift, colors change, and features blur until the face is no longer a face at all, replaced instead by blobs of brown and white that eventually fade to black.

## Daisy Bell

According to the artist, the subject of the project may be a [creative AI](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/neural-network-pokemon>), but her hope is that it reveals something new about humans.

"The brain constructs a different reality, but there is no one to call a bluff," she told *Vice*. "Neuroscientists tell us deep neural networks are similar to the visual system in certain aspects, so this project for me is a unique opportunity to see the world changing in someone’s mind, albeit artificially."

**READ MORE:** [Watching AI Slowly Forget a Human Face Is Incredibly Creepy](<https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evym4m/ai-told-me-human-face-neural-networks>) \[*Vice*\]

**More on creative AIs:** *[This AI Draws Horrifying New Pokémon](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/neural-network-pokemon>)*

### Author social links  
[LinkedIn](<https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinjhouser>)