The Hatchery: An AI product which came to prominence in the mid-2020s. Billed as “Pandora’s Box with training wheels”, The Hatchery purported to use generative adversarial networks to learn how to produce ‘the strangest things imaginable’. The user could feed known objects into The Hatchery, e.g. famous paintings or copies of one’s own childhood drawings, and The Hatchery would reinterpret them into strange altered odysseys or “news from a parallel universe where all toys are animate, or carpet is water”. The early uses of the product even allowed one to declare simple rules such as “mountains represent certain kinds of personal problems” and the AI would generate pictures from a baffling foreign continuum embodying such rules. One of the most famous examples was tweeted by Elon Musk, a video of The Hatchery where the user simply declares “the things which built this were also destroyed by it” and feeds it the Mona Lisa; the resulting output documents the everyday life of an alternate world in which Leonardo Da Vinci recursively refines the Mona Lisa until his life, his city and his entire world appear to be captured in the painting’s impossibly fractal glaze. In the final scene, a great cataclysm is shown to consume Florence in spectacular time-lapse, which is then revealed to be both a sequence of increasingly rapid brush strokes across Da Vinci’s paper and some kind of world-devouring computer graphics simulation. Additional feeds of the version of The Hatchery Elon Musk received have never been made public, though he is rumored to have had a Stanford Ph.D. re-route copies of his own brain activity through the product, in order to retrieve ‘memories’ of his own purported parallel-world past.