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Paper short abstract

Internet horror like "The Backrooms" casts AI as a sublime, alien force. I argue these stories invert transhumanist optimism: replacing enhancement with entrapment in opaque logic. As digital folklore, they rethink AI personhood and question the coherence of the "thinking subject."

Paper long abstract

Contemporary AI discourse is increasingly shaped not only by policy and technical claims, but also by vernacular genres – such as internet horror – that stage AI as an alien, sublime force. Drawing on a digital ethnography of AI-generated “Backrooms” imagery and associated discussion threads, I propose that this liminal space aesthetic functions as a tool for grasping opaque technology. By visualizing complex algorithms as endless, empty rooms, users render the opacity of AI habitable. They create a way to “walk through” the system’s alien logic – not simply to decode it, but to ritually enact the very disorientation and estrangement that the technology provokes. The paper contributes to the panel’s goal of rethinking intelligence by demonstrating how “dark” speculative aesthetics invert the promise of transhumanism. Instead of liberation or enhancement, these internet folklore materials portray a reality where both human bodies and digital spaces are rendered as “glitchy” data – trapped in an infrastructure that is indifferent, omnipresent, and unanswerable. I argue that this digital art folklore dramatize a crisis of personhood in which AI is alternately framed as monster, deity, or an otherwise alien moral actor. Furthermore, they illuminate why debates about AI consciousness repeatedly “slip” between technical abstraction and uncanny agency. By analyzing internet horror as an affective phenomenon, this paper offers anthropology a route into contemporary struggles over who or what can be recognized as a thinking subject in debates about AI.