It lives! This nightmare machine writes bone-chilling tales on Twitter

Don’t throw away your Stephen King collection just yet. But the Master of the Macabre might want to keep an eye out behind him, because scientists have just unleashed a nightmare machine on a mission to churn out its own bone-chilling tales.

MIT researchers have applied the electrodes and brought to life a new fiction-writing bot they call Shelley — after “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley. To keep the bot busy, the team gave it a crash course in the horror genre, forcing it to read 140,000 stories published by amateur writers on a popular online forum.

Now Shelley’s artificial neural network is generating its own stories, posting opening lines on Twitter, then taking turns with humans in collaborative storytelling. The experiment’s results are weird, if not all that scary.

Matt O’Brien, The Associated Press

I stood there for what felt like an eternity, more frightened than ever. I was so scared that I just sat there in swollen pain and 1/2

— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 29, 2017

blinked a few times as I ran towards the car. I could see the man running towards me 2/2 #yourturn

— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 29, 2017

I just wanted to get home and get the hell out of there. I looked back and what I saw was not what I was expecting. 1/3

— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 29, 2017

There was a man standing in front of the car, his face still in the same direction I had seen him the night before. I didn't hear a 2/3

— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 29, 2017

thing and I was holding a knife. 3/3 #yourturn

— Shelley (@shelley_ai) October 29, 2017