Scary Deep-Learning AI with Shelley

ProfHacker has addressed collaborative writing before, be it in Google Docs or in annotations around the web, but here’s a new one: MIT Media Lab‘s Scalable Operations project joined the party and is getting into the Halloween spirit. You may remember their previous trek into spooky AI with their Nightmare Machine, an incredibly disturbing (seriously, big warning for this one) AI-generated collection of horror imagery.

Enter Shelley, the Scalable Operation’s newest artificial intelligence bot designed to keep you up and night and answer the age-old question, “Can machines learn to scare us?”

Shelley is a deep-learning powered AI who was raised reading eerie stories coming from r/nosleep. Now, as an adult—and not unlike Mary Shelley, her Victorian idol—she takes a bit of inspiration in the form of a random seed, or a short snippet of text, and starts creating stories emanating from her creepy creative mind. But what Shelley truly enjoys is working collaboratively with humans, learning from their nightmarish ideas, creating the best scary tales ever. If you want to work with her, respond to the stories she’ll start every hour on her Twitter account, and she will write with you the first AI-human horror anthology ever put together!

Here’s an example of one of Shelley’s stories pieced together from a seed and other users’ contributions:

Twitter users reply to the original tweet with the #yourturn hashtag, letting Shelley and other users know it’s their turn to keep the story going. Sometimes Shelley writes the next line, other times it’s a user. To cap off the story, you would use the #theend hashtag.

Shelley.ai, or at least the concept behind it, demonstrates potential for growing interest in collaborative and public writing in the digital humanities, an interesting method of creative writing prompt generation, the groundwork for applying the same underlying deep learning to other fields, and much more.

Either way, it’s Halloween and everybody loves a good ghost story. If you’re interested, you can visit the official site, read more of Shelley’s stories, read more about the project itself, or put on your costume and participate on Twitter. Have you tried Shelley or the Nightmare Machine? Are you still losing sleep over it? Is AI scary enough without the horror stories? Let us know in the comments.

(Shelly graphic © Megan Murphy, http://www.murphypop.com/)

(Header image by Jesse Bowser at Unsplash.)

[Ryan Straight (@ryanstraight) is an Assistant Professor of Educational Technology, Faculty Fellow, and Honors Professor at the University of Arizona where he teaches classes on topics ranging from video game design to mobile learning technologies. His research focuses on applying postphenomenology to areas like interface design and digital curriculum and resource development. He also hosts the audio essay project The New Professor, owns the campus Slack team, and is an unabashed geek.--JBJ]