Cue a lightning flash and some portentous music: I have written with a robot.
The robot is Shelley, who isn’t really a robot, but actually an artificial intelligence developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the past couple of weeks, Shelley has been posting on Twitter the start of a horror story, and inviting users to continue it.
So, in the time-honoured question directed at any writer, where does Shelley get her ideas? No lofty explanations of the author’s craft here; Shelley has been trained to scour the Reddit online community sub-forum /r/nosleep, where users share their own spooky stories.
Learning the language of terror, Shelley – named and gendered for the godmother of horror, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley – puts together eerie little vignettes and, crucially, aims to continue them from the replies posted by Twitter users in a kind of round-robin collaborative writing exercise.
With a new story started every hour, you certainly can’t doubt her prolificness. But are the stories actually any good? Here are a couple of Shelley’s recent efforts:
I was standing right across the street, when a ghost stood behind me. I was so scared I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move. I wasn’t able to move my eyes, I was screaming.
My body was pulled into the room by the presence of someone who was standing somewhere in the hallway. I looked around once and there they were, standing in the corner of the room, as they stared at me, unmoving.
The screen flickered, and everything went black. I closed my eyes, and sat up. The darkness had subsided, and the page was the same as the one before, and the one in the middle of the message. I clicked the link, and the first few minutes, then black. I woke up this morning, screaming and crying.
Nothing, perhaps, to give Stephen King sleepless nights, but you can – and probably have – read far worse on the internet written by flesh-and-blood beings. The real magic of Shelley is more apparent when people reply, using the hashtag #yourturn to indicate to the bot to put her thinking cap on and continue the story. The tale Look Away, co-authored by Shelley and several Twitter users, hangs together enough to make you forget that one of the participants isn’t human.
So would Shelley play with me? It’s actually more difficult than you’d think to get involved: Shelley’s algorithms look for replies from Twitter users that have collected favourites or retweets to help her decide who to respond to. Mine didn’t get many thumbs-ups … either that, or Shelley just didn’t like me.
I tried to follow up on several of her stories, at one point throwing my takes on every story she posted on the hour. She has deigned to work with me once, so far. The story begins:
I started to breathe again. The chains in my ankle twitched and the shadow continued to stare. A silent cry and a few signs of life began to form.
Didn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, but I had a go: “But the chains! The chains! How was I to get myself free?”
Shelley duly responded: “I was losing my mind! I couldn’t move. The creature was there with me. What was it doing?”
Which, to be honest, I didn’t feel moved the narrative on much. Still, I had another go: “Then I noticed something. The beast was chained also. We were both prisoners in this place. But why? Who was responsible for this?”
We will perhaps never know. Shelley has decided to work on new material rather than conclude our short-lived story together. Does the experiment work? I suppose she can make a decent fist of continuing narratives with a measure of logic. While some of her efforts make little to no sense at all, some of them, like the aforementioned Look Away, do actually stack up in a basic fashion. Perhaps Shelley’s available database of the Reddit forum is too limiting; the MIT boffins should give her access to the entire body of horror literature. Or maybe that way madness lies …
