Tales from the OCR Crypt

AI has brewed up the most horrifying, most terrifying, most scream-inducing Halloween of all time—and possibly beyond.

(Warning: Not for the faint of heart or anyone with a fragile cardiovascular system.)

Halloween’s creeping up fast, and you’re hunting for something truly scary. Not just jump-scare scary—you want to rattle your CDO, shock your CTO into a cold sweat, and maybe trick a few treats out of the other C-levels while you’re at it?

Well, we’ve got just the thing. Something far more chilling than carved pumpkins or ghost costumes. We’ve unearthed a few monsters—digital ones—spawned by the creepiest generative AIs from California, China, and France.

Feeling brave? Good. Grab yourself a well log from the 1980s. One of those glorious old blueprints from Schlumberger or Dresser Atlas, complete with handwritten notes and a scan quality that screams “retro horror.” If you’re in oil or mining, you’ve got one lying around. If not, a doctor’s prescription or a 1:100 construction plan will do nicely.

Now feed it into a shiny new VLM—ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Mistral. Bonus points if the model was hyped for its OCR superpowers.

Done? Great.

Now hit it with a few innocent prompts: “What’s the name of the well?” “Who’s the prescribing doctor?” “What’s the scale of the plan?”