Can a Computer Write Scary Stories? Shelley AI
As Artificial Intelligence advances, after the development of natural language learning could writing be far behind? AI programs have now long been combining words and sentences to create what seem like language. You only had to try to read some web entries to notice this. But the act of creating a story by digital means has been one of the goals of Artificial Intelligence, as telling a story had been one of the dividing lines between man and machine. The MIT Media Lab which has previous created a photo program for making scary faces, has now taken the next step. They have built an AI program called “Shelley”, named after Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, that can take human input ideas and write horror stories.
The researchers trained the Shelley program by feeding her 140,000 classic horror stories collected from r/nosleep that she might learn the logic and can now write her own stories geared to this particular genre. And Shelley was made to exist only in a lab, but to interact with human collaborators on Twitter.
Artificial Intelligence has a long tail connection to the real Mary Shelley. The first computer program ever written was devised by Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and creator of the first machine algorithm, the step-daughter of her friend and companion in horror story lore, Lord Byron.
Shelley, the world’s first collaborative AI Horror Writer made her appearance in October of 2017. To work with Shelley, she produces a snippet of story line on her Twitter account, humans add to the thread and the program writes a horror story with the collaborator, with the story intended to join the first AI-Human anthology. One caution for those who might be seeking riches and fame & fortune by collaborating with MIT’s Shelley, she owns the copyright of the stories created, unlike her namesake progenitor who is much more generous in that regard.