A pair of AIs could help to make your Halloween festivities this year spookier by auto-generating some creepy material.

The first AI, created by Botnik Studios, uses stories from the ‘Give Yourself Goosebumps’ book series to create a brand new interactive story.

Nicky Martin, Managing Editor at Botnik, explained:

“We took ‘Give Yourself Goosebumps’ as our inspiration and threw those books into our predictive text writing software.

Our goal was to create a playable ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ style book where every word comes from ‘Give Yourself Goosebumps’.”

The book is titled ‘Give yourself Goosebumps: Welcome To Sand Hands’ and claims to have over 20 different endings.

It starts with the protagonist missing the school bus. A possible solution, of course, involves a shortcut by “walking — through Zombie Forest!”

A look at the first couple of pages shows the story is far from ready for publishing but it’s amusing and draws the reader in:

I don’t know about you, but I do want to know what ‘shmare’ is and why ‘Aunt Mom’ is keeping cheese sauce in her purse. I also want to know why the protagonist is friends with someone who loves their cousin’s feet, how the person is hearing yellow, and more about Pancakes Rocky who frankly sounds a bit of a legend that deserves his own spin-off.

There is so much going on and we’re only two pages in. The AI writer is even rather poetic, calling heavy schoolbooks ‘like bricks made of facts’.

From what I’ve read it doesn’t seem likely this story will be giving anyone nightmares, but the scare factor could be ramped up with some creepy music.

An AI experiment from MIT called ‘The Uncanny Musicbox’ aims to replicate the atmospheric soundtracks to any good horror flick.

The researchers achieved this using a large number of midi files in tandem with several horror movie soundtracks as ‘primer melodies’ to give the AI a starting point to make up the rest.

You can hear demo mixes below with the soundtrack they’re based on:

• Psycho
• Halloween
• Dollhouse
• Exorcist

The experiment from MIT is the latest in a series dating back to 2016 where each year a different horror-themed AI project was conducted.

In 2016, an experiment called Nightmare Machine was among the first AI projects that tackles a specific challenge: can AI not only detect, but induce extreme emotions such as fear in humans?

In 2017, Shelley, the world’s first collaborative AI Horror Writer, wrote over 200 horror stories collaboratively with Twitter users to create the first AI-Human horror anthology ever put together.

All of these projects show how AI can help scare us, for us weirdos that enjoy it.

  AI & >.

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Research scientist Janelle Shane decided to build a neural network fed with data of 4,500 costume names she crowdsourced from the internet (which is always a safe bet*)

Speaking to Business Insider, Shane claims the network’s creativity surprised her:

“I would argue that the Halloween costume neural network is actually right up there at coming up with creative things that humans love,” Shane said. “It can form its own rules about what it’s seeing rather than just memorising.”

Some prefer their Halloween costumes to have a sexy rather than scary theme, and it’s here where Shane’s AI — much like myself — couldn’t quite hit the mark. The AI came up with suggestions like ‘Sexy conchpaper’ and ‘Sexy Gumb Man’.

Perhaps those ideas have you hot under the collar… I won’t judge.

I trained a neural network to generate Halloween costumes. It had trouble w/the sexy costumes, but loved sharks. https://t.co/H1YW5qjckD pic.twitter.com/hEDWKc97gt

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) October 26, 2017

Some of the suggestions appear to be an unintentional stroke of genius from the AI. For example, it probably wasn’t aware of a somewhat clever pop culture link to Batman — otherwise known as The Dark Knight — when coming up with its ‘Shark Knight’ costume idea.

It’s not the first time Shane has used a neural network for coming up with new ideas. She’s previously received coverage for using an AI for the important task of naming craft beers. One beer, The Fine Stranger, is now even in production.

We’re unable to comment on whether the beer is as good as the name, but we’ll happily receive a sample for our vital research purposes if one is going. As for AI being used to reduce time spent on mundane tasks so we can get back to drinking beer — I mean, working… — we’re all for it.

*Obvious sarcasm.

Are there scenarios you would use AI for ideas and names?

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