Artificial intelligence learns to write short horror stories

Artificial intelligence is already learning to do the job of sports journalists and even best-selling fantasy books. So it's not exactly a surprise when we discover "Shelley", an AI programmed to create little horror tales.

Launched at the proper time for Halloween, the bot that works on Twitter was named after Mary Shelley, writer of no less than the classic "Frankestein".

Shelley was born in the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was fed with 140, 000 horror stories taken from a Reddit sub-forum. The goal was to teach the robot how to write scary and readable stories - and she managed as much as possible.

Check out some of the posts:

?? I could hear someone coming into my room. I couldn't see anything but I could hear the sound of something heavy being dragged across 1/2

- Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 31, 2017
  • "I was standing across the street when a ghost stopped behind me. I was so scared I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move my eyes. I was screaming."
  • "I heard firm but agile footsteps behind the door and then the door slammed shut. 'Do you want to be my friend?' The door answered back.
  • "I thought killing the dead wouldn't do me any good and I just didn't want to see the dead woman in the dirty white dress. I pretended to be as calm as possible, and the woman came and asked if I wanted to go outside." .

Perhaps the most curious feature of the bot is interactivity. Shelley tweetes new stories every hour separated into up to three tweets and can continue stories sent by users in their own conversation using the hashtag #yourturn (or "your turn"). In other cases, she begins the tale, some human continues, and she resumes the sequence based on these additions.

Not all stories told by Shelley are well written or scary. Several make no sense and are quite repetitive in words, while others do seem to be the work of someone who knows the subject well. At the very least, it's a curiosity to see how scary AI is this Halloween.