'I Wake Up in a Pool of Blood': These Horror Stories Were Written by an AI

"I wake up in a pool of blood." "I was trapped in this hospital bed." "I think I'm being stalked."

In horror stories, phrases like these conjure up scenes that can make your blood run cold or cause your heart to beat a little faster. But the author of these words has no heartbeat, nor any blood to chill.

Meet "Shelley," a neural network raised on a diet of horror fiction. Shelley is taking the terrifying lessons learned from those stories and penning its own spooky narratives using artificial intelligence (AI) — along with a little help from like-minded human collaborators. [5 Intriguing Uses for Artificial Intelligence (That Aren't Killer Robots)]
Shelley shares her name with pioneering Victorian horror writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley — the author of "Frankenstein" — and the AI came to life at MIT Media Lab, where it was built by the group that previously programmed the Nightmare Machine in 2016. This aptly named neural network also had a knack for unsettling creative work — it transformed ordinary photographs into jarring nightmarish hellscapes.

But whereas the Nightmare Machine was trained with scary images, Shelley was weaned on words — scary words — "learning" from over 140,000 horror stories that were posted on the Reddit forum r/nosleep, Pinar Yanardag, a postdoctoral candidate at MIT Media Lab, told Live Science in an email.

Once Shelley was able to recognize the types of narrative elements that appear in horror stories — eerie imagery, keywords and scenarios — she could write her own, "starting from a random seed or a short snippet of text," Yanardag said.

Sometimes, the results are downright chilling, such as this tweet: "I sat alone for a few minutes before I finally got the courage to tell myself that nothing had happened. I was wrong."