SHELLEY: Human-AI Written Horror

Shelley, an interactive art project led by Iyad Rahwan at the MIT Media Lab, was the world's first collaborative AI horror story writer! Launched ahead of Halloween 2017, Shelley was a deep-learning powered AI trained on 140,000 eerie stories from r/nosleep. Like Mary Shelley - her Victorian namesake - Shelley takes a bit of inspiration in the form of a random seed, or a short snippet of text, and starts creating stories. But what Shelley truly enjoys is to work collaboratively with humans. Starting October 25, and leading up to Halloween, she took turns with humans, via her Twitter account, in authoring very short (flash fiction) stories. The result is the first AI-Human horror short story anthology. Long before the meteoric rise of powerful chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, Shelley gave a glimpse of what was possible.

Selected media: The Guardian, BBC, Newsweek, Quartz, Engadget, Fortune

Team: Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, Iyad Rahwan

Scientific writings:

Sample Stories:

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