MIT built an A.I. bot that writes scary stories -- and some are terrifying

MIT's new A.I. is another illustration of how spookily useful artificial intelligence can be in the creative process. If you want something really spooky to get you in the mood for Halloween, how about the prospect of machines which don't just carry out regular routinized work, but can actually be creative -- thereby performing a function we typically view as being quintessentially human? That's (kind of) what researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed with a new October 31-themed artificial intelligence project: The world's first collaborative A.I. horror writer. Anyone is welcome to reply to the tweet with the next installment of the story, thereby prompting Shelley to reply again with the next part. "Shelley is a deep learning-based A.I. that took her name [from] horror story writer, Mary Shelley," Pinar Yanardhag, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends.