Shelley: the Artificially Intelligent Horror Writer.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is best known for its programs in engineering and the physical sciences. Its researchers have recently been looking into varied subjects such as recycling plastics, early cancer detection, and cellular reprogramming for Alzheimer’s patients. Along with the more serious and groundbreaking medical studies, MIT researchers have also been pushing the limits of artificial intelligence.

Their latest venture has been creating a piece of deep-learning artificial intelligence named for the writer Mary Shelley. Shelley the AI writer was raised on a Reddit thread r/nosleep in which budding writers add original creepy tales. Nourished with the most eerie tales on the internet, Shelley has moved on to collaborating with Twitter users to produce her own horror stories.

After the success of last Halloween’s Nightmare Machine, MIT researchers created Shelley to push the limits on how much a deep learning AI could learn and reproduce. Shelley now collaborates with writers on Twitter to produce horror stories for Halloween 2017. Many of the stories created are pretty damn creepy but a few nonsensical ones slip through the net, like the one below.

Check out some of the Tweets below and let us know your favourite.

You can still join in the creepy fun if you head over to Twitter and interact with @shelley_ai . Use the hashtag #YourTurn to allow others to continue a story, or #TheEnd to mark the end of a story.

Have fun, and happy horror writing!