It’s official: reddit is the stuff of nightmares Getty

I remember his face in a look of horror, and it was agony and malice. I was trapped. I was trapped in this hospital bed.

This isn’t the start of the latest Stephen King novel, it’s in fact the start of a horror story told by artificial intelligence.

Shelley AI is currently working on a different short scary tale once an hour leading up to Halloween. It’s powered by deep learning algorithms that have been trained on stories collected from the subreddit /r/nosleep where people share their own original eerie works. The AI was created by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.


The AI works best when given a bit of inspiration so anyone can join in the story writing process to make it a joint effort. Collaborators simply add their own blood-curdling sentences to the compositions so far on Twitter and Shelley then continues from where they finish.

Some of the best sinister snippets so far include:

I heard my mother’s voice scream from the darkness. “God dad, please don’t hurt me again. Please don’t leave me alone. Please. I don’t want to be here anymore.” I turned to my left, and for a split second I could see it was her. After all that time, all I could make out were those black eyes above me.

My heart is beating so fast it is a bit shorter than my breathing. I think I’m being stalked. I don’t know what happened to me, or why I was scared of it, but I need to know why. I need to know what happened.

And my personal favourite:

She fell to the floor from her cries and muttered a soft ‘Come to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’.