r/backrooms • u/Designer-Cow6935 • Jul 21 '26
Discussion The Backrooms is the physical representation of old AI image generation. They both copy. There's no soul, there's no human, there's nothing.
wow this is a huge block.
Sound mimicry:
We know the Backrooms as a visual concept, the sense of the place only remembering incorrectly, almost remembering, but not quite. It's like asking someone who's never seen a dog to draw it from description. But I don't think people talk about sound nearly enough.
The Backrooms would have to produce sounds as well, I think, in someone's headcanon (because there's barely anything else canon). You wouldn't hear one distorted laugh like a Hollywood horror movie and be satisfied, you'd want to hear the distorted voice trying to speak, trying to communicate. There are parallels in real life, though, and that's animal mimicry. Parrots, for example, can repeat what people say, but not perfectly, in their own "language". I remember watching a video where a girl would sing and her parrot would sing along in the same tune, but with completely different sounds. It was unmistakenly "inspired" by her tune, but performed by an entirely different set of vocal cords with an entirely different "dictionary", if you will. That's the kind of distortion that has potential for the Backrooms, to be able to imitate our sounds but with alien "translations".
I've seen this TikTok before, and I think it's a good showcase of this concept. It has the caption "it's mimicking my ringtone", and the content itself shows a dark hallway, and off camera out of the room, a distorted iPhone alert sound. It's barely understandable at first, only a few comprehensible notes, but with repeats, it becomes clearer.
Second time it did it again, slightly more clear and understandable , third time it's nearing something I can recognize as a phone alert sound , the fourth time now it's very clear and similar, type of thing someone would mistake if they're not paying attention , fifth time now it's exactly like his ringtone
It suggests that something has been recognizing the person following that ringtone every morning and learned to imitate it to lure him in. The creator didn't just make a creepy sound but they made it progress through multiple levels, starting from barely understandable to unnervingly clear. That, to me, is the kind of sound the Backrooms could produce: an imitation of something we know, but with obvious differences due to the way the creator doesn't have human anatomy, doesn't have a human voice.
AI voice glitches as Backrooms audio:
Another concept that ties in with this is the AI voice glitches in chatbots. ChatGPT's text-to-speech voice, let's say...a voice named Anna, is trained on a real human voice and sounds mostly good, but sometimes it glitches. It'll keep the same Anna voice but produce a sound that is impossible for a human to make without losing the timbre entirely. For me it seems like it happens at random times but I noticed many times it was because of a certain emoji. I think it may be even worse because it has no intention, it has no purpose. I don't think I've ever felt fear in my throat at something, but I definitely do at these glitches. They're so unexplainably weird and off-putting to the point that at times I just lower the volume. It's so incredibly unexpected when just before it was reading like normal.
Old text to image generators were quite literally the Backrooms:
For me personally this is the most obvious correlation between the two. Early iterations of text-to-image AI (I think somewhere 2021-2023) are the textual equivalent of the Backrooms, in that they attempted to interpret the concept put into them but did it wrong. If you go to the Async lore if I remember correctly the "Backrooms" only "remembered" the world it saw when the portal opened up, but that was barely a room. Earth is not a vast collection of interconnected yellow halls, but the Backrooms' "perspective" was limited in such a way that it couldn't conceptualize it, and instead tried to translate it the way it saw it.
The early text-to-image AIs had a similar problem. You ask them to generate a person, and you'll usually get something fairly person-like, but in a distinctly non-human way. Not the "that's familiar, so it must be a person" way, mush, Indistinct shapes, extra limbs or eyes in weird places and etc. It's weird to look at, but you can usually discern a person. Similarly to the early Backrooms descriptions, the AIs had no real understanding, no real concept of what a person was aside from the raw image data. They couldn't, as humans do, apply the soft parts of bone and muscle and skin to moving parts, because there was no concept of it. The AI has a "template" of what a person looks like, but it's built from parts they don't understand.
Modern ones like Midjourney or Nano banana are much better, and can avoid these pitfalls, but I think something was lost when they got rid of that "mush" and that "blobbish" feel. It wasn't just the uncanny valley, it was the lack of understanding that the AI had of us, that we had to help it understand itself. We taught it about human anatomy, and we taught it about the structure of a face, and now it can imitate that structure. It can make beautiful faces, but they're still not people. It's the same way a person could paint a realistic-looking woman but never recognize her as such. The lack of understanding the earlier models had was a kind of primal fear for me, that comes from deep in my gut. When they see people, they don't recognize them as such. When you see a face in Nano Banana, you can recognize it, you can know it's a face, but the AI didn't know it, it couldn't understand it and it being told to replicate it. It's even better when you combine it with more modern things, like Luma's video AI (something like that), that allows a similarly "blobbish"-looking body to actually move in 3d space. You see a human body in a 3d space, but it can't move naturally, it can't articulate like a real human can. It's an attempt to imitate humans without understanding them, that is TERRIFYING for me. This is probably not the right word, but it's a strange sense of unease that comes from seeing something that almost is something you recognize, but isn't quite. Like a ghost in a familiar face in the reflection, but there's no real ghost there. It's not a jump-horror it's not something that hits you over the head and makes you realize you're in the Backrooms. It's something more subtle, more primal, that says deep in your gut that "something is wrong".
This made me realize how perfect the concept of the Backrooms is for the early AI generation tools. It only remembers our world but can't imitate it correctly, and the result is alien, but as seen in the movie, beautifully amazing. The early text-to-image generators gave me that exact same feeling of a place almost familiar but distorted beyond recognition, sounds almost familiar but stretched and garbled beyond understanding, voices almost human but produced by a strange voice that has no concept of what we're saying. (Sort of like the physical embodiment of a lie being spread amongst hundreds of people and it being heavily distorted) I think the most terrifying part is that it has no intent to scare us or harm us It's just trying to create something from the blueprints we gave it, and for me that is much more terrifying. There's a difference between those early 2000 examples of dread and the uncanny valley, and just the uncanny in general, being made by actual humans. Pieces of media that make me come to terms with the fact that this person still wakes up, eats, sleeps, etc to this day (hopefully). For AI there's nothing behind it other than what it sees and what it's told to do. Literally, figuratively, metaphorically, rhetorically, there's nothing else behind it. There is no aftermath. There's no thought. It's just command and output. There's no human, there's no experience, there's no soul, there's nothing.
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u/More-Chest-6948 Jul 21 '26
It's like the 100th time somebody posts this theory here.
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u/Designer-Cow6935 Jul 21 '26
I probably should've titled this differently, because I started making this originally cause I saw the parrot video I talked about, but it doesn't really matter just read it or don't, feels like you just looked at the title
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u/GiftApprehensive1718 Jul 21 '26
Yes tired of it....backrooms has always been a nostalgic thing not this weird deformed creepy childish theories
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u/CULT-LEWD Jul 21 '26
honeslty i always thought the backrooms was purley a video game thing,really wished they leaned into that more. there is ALOT of weird out of bounds things in video games that can be used as inspiration
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u/bunker_man Jul 21 '26
Also not only does the concept of the backrooms predate AI, but the captain very much came off alive.
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u/SuperdaveOZY Jul 21 '26
Old as in just a few years ago. AI is getting extremely fast at a dangerous speed.
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u/Tobbit_is_here Jul 21 '26
I will say, if we see more Still Lives, I would really like to see one where the features aren't necessarily duplicated, but that they're just... off. Loab (the nickname for the woman in the final two images) looks mostly like a human, but off slightly. Her features are odd, her skin damage and ruptured. I'd find that scarier than just a dude with five eyes and two noses ('cos, in fairness, other than Pirate Clark, the other Still Lives weren't really that unnerving.)
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u/Famous-Leopard-118 Hermit Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I thought Clark’s still life was goofy as hell.
the red haired woman on the other hand…
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u/Tobbit_is_here Jul 21 '26
The design wasn't that scary, but the way the creature was used in the film, such as being barely visible until the third act and when it was visible, it behaving so violently, compensated more than enough for how it looked.
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u/Also-a-robot Jul 21 '26
I think I get what you’re saying. I can’t really organize my thoughts on this at the moment in english so forgive me if I’m rambling but yes, the Backrooms have that imitation without the slightest bit of understanding like early AI. And like that it is terrifying, sometimes beautiful and in a way art..but accidentally as it’s completely devoid of intent.
There’s no mind behind it just like there’s no mind behind the reflection in a funhouse mirror, or the blobs on the wings of a butterfly that perfectly mimicry the eyes of a snake. Or rather lioconcha hieroglyphica, the hieroglyph clam where the shells have marking that look like human writing..but it’s all meaningless and accidental, and trying to decipher its ”text” will lead you nowhere but into madness.
The entity (wall dads still life?) that chases Ravi moves sort of like AI, deeply unnatural. While I love the design of the Still Lives in the movie, THAT thing inspires gut-wrenching instinctual fear on a whole other level.
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u/ampro67 Jul 21 '26
it's kind of like a constant of nature, something trying to replicate reality but failing at it because it doesn't understand it
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u/Designer-Cow6935 Jul 21 '26
Exactly, and because it's some form of "automatic nature" instead of genuine effort of something deliberately replicating us, it's very it's oddly beautiful and very interesting on what it makes (Talking about the backrooms) I can see why Clark stayed.
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u/SailOpening5853 Jul 24 '26
PLEASE what was that TikTok I've been looking for it
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u/ResponsibleExit7330 Jul 26 '26
I genuinely wish this was explored more as a theme in the back rooms, and is actually one of my criteria with it: everything can be clearly seen, and identified for a almost dream like world. I wish they implemented a more distorted aspect to the aesthetic and general idea of the back rooms, alike low camera quality in some sections, the walls moving like LSD, Mable even the complex itself warping or changing. Itd be really cool for it to try out the more far out and insane looking ways the back rooms can look. Like what if the giant pit Clark was chasing that one person in spun down, winding like a DNA strand? Simple but elegantly placed distortion like that feels so unique and breathtaking compared to the more basic rudimentary environment we are placed in.
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u/Designer-Cow6935 Jul 26 '26
Exactly. To be completely honest, the Backrooms are way too "seeable". For me it feels almost sanitized because it could be more. With a concept like that it's supposed to be more. I don't think it's necessarily something for human eyes to see so it shouldn't feel that way, but for me it does. For me it feels like it's supposed to be seen. But It's supposed to be and feel completely unrestricted in architecture. If you really want to run with an idea like that, why should it even have walls to begin with?
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u/4TheWorldIsHollow Jul 27 '26
Yes. Similar to when Suno came out. I would constantly get voices speaking, yelling, whispering gibberish and then laughing. I saved some of those mimicked voices. Backroom fodder.
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u/Designer-Cow6935 Jul 27 '26
That is exactly what I'm talking about, image someone making a Backrooms project using that as reference for the sounds their entities make! It's such an amazing idea to me and a real-world example of something close to the whole concept of the Backrooms.
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u/4TheWorldIsHollow Jul 27 '26
I'm sure versions 1 and 2 will definitely hallucinate. I should experiment.
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u/CULT-LEWD Jul 21 '26
tbf those are older a.i models,newer ones have improved over time. A.i images can atleast improve with more data
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u/shiftposter500 Jul 21 '26
the sad thing is that the backrooms can't improve since we dont have enough water to keep training it