Don’t throw away your Stephen King collection just yet. But the Master of the Macabre might want to keep an eye out behind him, because scientists have just unleashed a nightmare machine on a mission to churn out its own bone-chilling tales.

MIT researchers have applied the electrodes and brought to life a new fiction-writing bot they call Shelley — after “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley. To keep the bot busy, the team gave it a crash course in the horror genre, forcing it to read 140,000 stories published by amateur writers on a popular online forum.

Now Shelley’s artificial neural network is generating its own stories, posting opening lines on Twitter, then taking turns with humans in collaborative storytelling. The experiment’s results are weird, if not all that scary.

Matt O’Brien, The Associated Press


Shelley
Twitter – Stories by Shelly @shelley_ai https://twitter.com/shelley_ai

 

Filed under: halloween, horror, shelley, writing