Target started putting out their Halloween decor this week, so I thought I’d mark the occasion with a little microfiction. Enjoy!

The Halloween Aisle
Kevin’s mom waved a hand in front of the motion sensor. The severed head screamed in agony.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It sounds too real.”
“It was trained on evidence from war crime trials,” Kevin explained. “It’s all public domain.”
“It’s not a real recording?”
“No, mom.” He’d explained LLMs at least a hundred times.
She frowned at the price tag: $79.99. “Kind of expens—”
The head interrupted her, crying and screaming in Arabic, plastic eyes rolling in plastic sockets.
“I’ll rake the leaves!” Kevin lied.
She sighed. “Fine. Don’t put it in the baby’s room.”
Okay, I admit, this is a pretty lame horror story.
But I do keep thinking about how easy it is to record evidence of war crimes nowadays. The Ukrainian government even has an app that lets citizens upload evidence in real time (subcategories include sexual violence, torture, death, violence against children, hostage taking, etc).
In the last twenty years alone, we’ve probably gotten enough audio to make a sizeable dataset of human suffering - which of course makes it easier for defendants in international court to claim that sounds and images are AI-generated.
Maybe the real horror was the LLMs we made along the way.
This made me chuckle.
Proooobably shouldn’t have
But I didn’t get the “trained” reference the first time round and the interrupting screaming reminded me too much of my 6yo’s current favourite knock knock joke about the interrupting cow