MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Bot Writes Horror Stories

Artificial intelligence can do a lot of things and you can now add writing horror stories to that list. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an artificial intelligence-powered bot that can write horror stories. Named Shelley, the researchers say that it’s the first collaborative AI horror writer in the world.

Pinar Yanardhag, a researcher on the project, revealed that Shelley is a deep learning based artificial intelligence bot that took her name from Mary Shelley, a real horror story writer.

The bot was initially trained on more than 140,000 horror stories on Reddit’s popular r/nosleep subreddit. The bot is now capable of generating random snippets based on what it has learned so far and it can continue a story given the text.

Shelley has co-authored more than 100 stories with Twitter users so far and “some of them are really scary,” Yanardhag says.

Shelley can be found spinning stories on Twitter. The bot tweets out a new horror story every hour with the hashtag #yourturn. It’s an invitation to humans who want to contribute to the story. They can do that by replying to Shelley’s original tweet. The bot will then reply again with the next part once it receives the reply.

Head over to Shelley’s Twitter page right now and get in on the action. It’s not every day you get a chance to co-author a horror story with a machine.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: artificial intelligence, Twitter