Artificial intelligence has really been all around us the past few years. It’s been in our phones, desktops, speakers, lights, and even in the toilet (yes, but that’s for a separate piece). But, as we bid farewell to Halloween, your go-to for spooks would probably have been a piece of human handiwork — you know, horror movies, horror novels, chocolate-filled momos, and so on.
Not if the dedicated folk at the MIT Media Lab have their way. They’ve conjured ‘Shelley’, a deep-learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot who writes her own horror stories. Yes, a piece of software that writes its own ghost stories. Not ominous at all!
Named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, the AI bot uses information and spooks from 1,40,000 pieces of horror fiction from Reddit’s r/nosleep subreddit. Every hour, her Twitter handle tweets one line beginning a story.
Akin to the round robin writing technique, people add to the story with their tweets ending with #yourturn. Shelley adds her own lines occasionally, and this goes on till the tale is complete, when somebody ends a line with #theend. Of course, Shelley is the final arbiter of this all. The final product of this human-AI collaboration is often some genuinely frightening material, collated on stories.shelley.ai.
According to the website, Shelley is created to learn from human beings’ ‘nightmarish ideas’, and to tell the best collaborative tales. Don’t forget, this is a piece of software that learns from what living beings have documented, to create something on and of its own. All our dystopian AI-robot fantasies/ nightmares are on the cusp of fruition. “Shelley’s creative mind has no boundaries,” the researchers at MIT told MIT News, and that’s a horror story in itself, if you think about it.
So, put away the Lovecrafts and Stephen Kings. Shelley’s back. And this Frankenstein’s monster is just as scary now as it was 200 years ago.