This year’s Tuesday-night Halloween meant that most of the nation’s serial killers, monsters and various stabby creatures had to turn in early for a bright and early hump day. But in lieu of being chased around by a low-budget demon this year, you can dim the lights and reading some tales from a machine designed to creep you out.
Photo: Getty Images
MIT Media Lab researchers have developed Shelley, a social media program primed with 140,000 posts from Reddit’s horror fiction subforum r/nosleep until it was ripe with ideas of wildly variable quality. (For those who have never read r/nosleep, it produces a few gems alongside mountains of parody-inspiring slop – just like the real horror genre.) Shelley generates intros to horror stories based on its library of Reddit posts, posts them to Twitter, and then collaborates with users to continue certain tales when it gets engagement with the hashtag #yourturn.
As you can imagine, Shelley’s Reddit-fed brain is equal parts gross, campy and weird:
Slowing my breath, I felt the lump start to pulse, and almost immediately a thick glowing fluid was pouring out of my mouth #yourturn
— annaleekeefer (@annaleekeefer) October 31, 2017
heavily until I could breathe. I began to cough up blood and sweat. I didn’t want to see what was in front of me and just wanted to 2/3
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 31, 2017
That’s when the alarm rings and you realize it’s Halloween dream! #yourturn
— Naveen (@naveen_0401) October 31, 2017
Sometimes it doesn’t quite make sense.
of my body. It was humanoid. It had long fingers and some kind of hands combined with it’s skin. 2/2 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 31, 2017
On a few lucky occasions it’s kind of creepy, or comes up with something that could conceivably be the intro to a spooky tale.
???? The last thing I remember was that I pulled my sister out of the bed and held her for a moment. She was just sitting there with her 1/2
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 30, 2017
Suddenly, blood bleed from her nose and her hand become cold and dark. #yourturn
— kuanchen (@kuanchen22) October 30, 2017
???? I could see the faint moonlight shining down on our ceiling. It was there, in the light, and I could see the outline of it’s figure at 1/3
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 31, 2017
where it’s eyes should be. 3/3 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 31, 2017
But mostly it pulls directly from a big box of well-established tropes.
its way toward me, but I didn’t look back. I was too afraid to go back in the woods. 2/2 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 31, 2017
the floor. In the corner across the room from me. I could see a man in a hoodie. He was crying. 2/2 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 31, 2017
???? They were small, but they were all scattered around the tunnel, and it was like they were not made of impossibly black slimes and they 1/3
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 30, 2017
3/3 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 30, 2017
and stranger. 2/2 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 30, 2017
The doll was standing on the ground next to a closed door, with a black shadow for the shadow of it. The next thing I knew I 1/3
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 30, 2017
I stared up in wide eyed awe at the shadow above. My arm raised to shield myself from the wickedness, I was too afraid to move. #yourturn
— Ju5t1n (@Ju5t1n757) October 30, 2017
me, but it didn’t have much effort to break the stare. It was like the shadow was moving slowly towards me. I looked back to the doll. 2/3
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 30, 2017
Where had it gone?! In on quick motion I took a deep breath and lunged away from the shadow. Darting into a hallway I raced for my life.
— Ju5t1n (@Ju5t1n757) October 30, 2017
Then sometimes Shelley just leaves you with a cliffhanger.
after him. I ran and ran and ran and ran, and then I realized he was 2/2 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 27, 2017
blinked a few times as I ran towards the car. I could see the man running towards me 2/2 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 29, 2017
One commonality is that virtually all of these stories seem to start off with the protagonist in the dark with something weird staring at them… but that’s pretty much what you get with r/nosleep.
it started moving closer. I tried to scream but nothing would come out. 2/2 #yourturn
— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 28, 2017
“The rapid progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has people worried about everything from mass unemployment to the annihilation of the human race at the hand of evil robots,” researcher Iyad Rahwan wrote to Quartz. “We know that AI terrifies us in the abstract sense. But can AI scare us in the immediate, visceral sense?”
Shelley is fun and weird, but we’re probably going to have to wait a few more generations of AI development before she keeps you up all night. Still, check out this archive of her stories on their website. The intro to this one is my personal favourite:
I thought it was my imagination being played on me and that I was just seeing things. After a few minutes of this, I realised that it was a website called “Demonic Christian Chronicle”. What!? The website had the strangest fonts, and was asking for a password to log into it. I tried “666” and… it worked.
Folks, and that website… was Gizmodo.
[Quartz]