Spooky motel/bunkhouse/cabin room with a mysterious pale circle on the floor Text: The Floor is Haunted Nightmare eaters composed of varying appearance all appearing at events in numerous locations around the world. For seeing them all in one place where they are all weary and starving. Also, the floor is now haunted.

Now that so many of us are spending so much time in our own homes, the thought of being stuck in a room is very much on our minds. If you’ve ever done an escape room, you know that you can pay to be stuck in a room - except that you get to choose your own form of peril and there’s generally less time spent baking and watching shows. In case we run out of ways to be trapped in a room, Jesse Morris, an actual escape room designer, sent me the names of about 1100 existing escape rooms so I could train a neural net to generate more.

I gave all 1100 escape room names to the 124M size of GPT-2 and trained it for literally just a few seconds (if I gave it more training time it would probably have memorized all the examples, since that’s technically a solution to “generate names like these”).

The neural net did pretty well at escape rooms! It could draw not only on the names themselves, but also on other things it had seen during its general internet training. (And sometimes it seemed like it thought it was doing movie titles or computer game levels). I had to check to make sure it didn’t copy these from the training data:

Image: A spooky vaultlike place with strange glimmers of light on the wall. At the end of the room is an arch with a concentric structure inside that might be a tortoise shell, or might be an eye. Text: The Tortoise and the Crypt After your research suggests that a species of reptilian alien, the Orochi, may have inhabited Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, you and your team head to the frozen ruins of Los Angeles in search of the answer. You will soon learn that the Orochi are not the only evil in the world.
The Forgotten Castle
Scarlet Room
The Silent Chamber

It did its best to make spooky rooms, although there’s something off about these maybe:

Image: It looks kind of a like a messy cathedral except all the light is red and there is something very red and faintly organic descending everywhere from the ceiling. Text: Scarlet Room A mysterious laboratory secretes a liquid that can cure diseases. The cure is deadly and deadly. You must find the cure and escape.
Maw of the Ice Throne
Malvo’s Death Star
Cryopod
Void Bomb
The Floor is Haunted
The Tortoise and the Crypt
Nuclear Zombies Nursery

And these escape rooms just sound weird:

Image: a relaxed-looking orange tabby cat whose fur is spreading out hugely in all directions. Text: The Cat Abounds Help Timmy play a game of hide and seek with animals. But you can’t hide from the cat, the cat is always watching.
The Cat Abounds
The Mail Dragon
I’ve found Grandpa’s 2.0 Bison
Countdown to the Pizza Shop
Chocolate Truck
The Elevator Belongs to Me
Three Dogs and a Bison
Forgotten Pharaohs Pet Shop
The Room with a Chance of Being in it
Image: an underground hallway? open-plan house? The walls are disturbingly cavelike. All its objects are unidentifiable and there’s a door in the middle that seems to show outside light, yet isn’t connected to any walls. Text: The Room with a Chance of Being in it Oh no! A surprise earthquake, a horrific flood, a mysterious visitor from the future! The last thing you and your friends want is to go through the same disaster again... ...but they don't know how to stop time, either.

These sound commonplace in a frankly rather unsettling manner.

Image: It could be curio cabinets at a museum, but the geometry is all messed up, and all the curios are indistinct voids. Text: Cabinet of Sainsbury Adventure A dentist at Sainsbury's has a secret, strange creature locked away in his office... but who is it?
Cat House
Cake Shop
Sausage Experience
Cabinet of Sainsbury Adventure
Cutthroat Tea House
The Body Shop
Escape from Wonderful World of Gumball

I’m super curious about these celebrity/pop culture escape rooms:

Image: It’s a small device of some sort, golden with lots of circular ports that are almost but not quite like eyeballs Text: Mr. T’s Clocks Mr T has provided you with a clock to aid you in your efforts. Click it, try to move the light switches, and stop the feeding of the pigeons.
Miss Piggy’s Curse
The Haunted: The Lorax
Mr. T’s Clocks
The X-Files: Tee Time
Miss A.I.’s Deco Room

For the images above, I used GPT-2-simple to prompt a default instance of GPT-2-778M with a couple of example escape room descriptions, plus the name of the escape room I wanted it to generate a description for. It figured out how to copy the format, which I found super impressive. Then to generate creepy images to go with the descriptions, I used artbreeder to combine different scenes. “Scarlet Room”, for example, is “vault” plus “theater curtain” plus “prison” plus “butcher shop”.

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