AI Can Now Write Horror Stories, The End Of Human Writers?

For the most part, the threat of artificial intelligence or automation taking over jobs has been largely contained to manual labor sectors. Now, it seems the tech industry is also intent on replacing people in more technical vocations such as writers. One AI is now capable of writing fictional horror stories by simply taking inspiration from what human writers have produced.

The AI in question is Shelley AI and according to the official website, it’s the first collaborative project where machine and man work together to produce new horror fiction. It is being introduced just in time for Halloween, as well, which makes its unveiling thematically appropriate.

“Shelley is a deep-learning powered AI who was raised reading eerie stories collected 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,” the site reads.

The r/nosleep is reference actually pertains to a Sub-Reddit that is dedicated to horror stories. It’s a crowdsourced platform where anyone could post disturbing, horrifying, and most importantly, frightening tales.

As Futurism notes, Shelley is capable of producing written quality that can be equated to the works of published authors. However, it is incapable of creating these stories on its own. The AI needs a source to work with such as a particular sentence that starts off spooky. From there, Shelley writes a scene based on many of the works of fiction it has read before.

For reference, here is a snippet of a story that Shelley wrote titled “Mirror”:

“I slowly moved my head away from the shower curtain, and saw the reflection of the face of a tall man who looked like he was looking in the mirror in my room. I still couldn’t see his face, but I could just see his reflection in the mirror. He moved toward me in the mirror, and he was taller than I had ever seen. His skin was pale, and he had a long beard.”