Meet Shelley, The World’s First Collaborative A.I. Horror Writer

Halloween’s over and you’re probably left with too much candy and a face of make-up. But that’s not all; thanks to MIT, you also have the chance to experience the magic of A.I. for more than one night. Shelley, the world’s first collaborative A.I. horror writer, came to life on this occasion but its spooky stories are just getting good #machinemagic

With October 31st in mind, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained the neural network “on over 140,000 horror stories on Reddit’s popular r/nosleep subreddit, and is able to generate random snippets based on what she learned, or continue a story given a text. ” They let it loose on Twitter, under the name of Shelley after the horror story writer, Mary Shelley.

This is not the first A.I. writer but it is the first that comes up with horror stories with the help of humans. Using its Twitter account, Shelley shares the beginning of a story with its followers every hour. This is always accompanied by the hashtag #yourturn, so human fans know they’re invited to continue it.

And they actually do. There are threads ranging from 8 tweets and 3 participants to those containing 77 tweets and 7 participants. And after each input, the A.I. comes with another one of its own. Needless to say, Shelly is slowly but surely becoming a social media star.

All in all, MIT says their artificial intelligence has co-authored over 100 stories to date and is likely to write much, much more. Last year, for Halloween, MIT used neural networks to produce scary images.