MIT Media Lab researchers have created an AI program that can write horror stories in collaboration with humans via Twitter, reports David Wade for CBS Boston. “Over time, we are expecting her to learn more from the crowd, and to create even more scarier stories,” says postdoctoral associate Pinar Yanardag.
MIT researchers have developed an artificial neural network that can generate horror stories by collaborating with people on Twitter, HuffPost reports. Pinar Yanardag, a postdoc at the Media Lab, explains that the system is, “creating really interesting and weird stories that have never really existed in the horror genre.”
Associated Press reporter Matt O’Brien details how Media Lab researchers have developed a new system, dubbed Shelley, that can generate scary stories. O’Brien explains that, “Shelley's artificial neural network is generating its own stories, posting opening lines on Twitter, then taking turns with humans in collaborative storytelling.”
Newsweek reporter Joseph Frankel writes that MIT Media Lab researchers have developed an AI system named Shelley that uses human input to write short horror stories. Frankel explains that Shelley, “tweets out one or two sentences as the start of a new horror story, then calls for users to respond with their own lines.”
Researchers from MIT’s Urban Risk Lab piloted a free online tool that crowdsources social media posts to map flood conditions during Hurricane Irma, writes Frankie Schembri for NOVA Next. “Residents often have the best information about the situation near them,” explains research scientist Tomas Holderness, “and we now have the network to be able to collect information.”
Writing for Wired, Prof. Ethan Zuckerman and Chelsea Barabas and Neha Narula of the Digital Currency Initiative address the difficulties in creating decentralized social media networks. “If users have more control of their data, including the right to export and reuse content they’ve created and friends they follow, they’ll be more willing to experiment with new platforms,” the researchers suggest.
Jesse Lichtenstein writes for The New York Times about Jonny Sun, a PhD candidate in DUSP, whose humorous Twitter feed, “jomny sun,” has become increasingly popular for offering “comfort, whimsy and an alternative to the rage/panic/schadenfreude/political flame-warring of much online discourse.” “Twitter is often thought of as a shallow, superficial thing,” said Sun, but “there’s a lot of honest pathos and humanity in it.”
In an article for The Atlantic, Prof. Ethan Zuckerman proposes creating a public social media platform that focuses on “aggregating and curating, pushing unfamiliar perspectives into our feeds and nudging us to diversity away from the ideologically comfortable material we all gravitate towards.”
WBUR’s Asma Khalid highlights how MIT researchers have developed a tool that allows people to see the social media world of other users. Grad student Martin Saveski explains that the project was aimed at connecting people with differing viewpoints, noting that beyond politics there are “many other things that we may have in common.”
Dan Kennedy of WGBH News writes about a new study from researchers at the MIT Center for Civic Media and Harvard that examined social-media sharing patterns among conservative and liberal individuals.
Saqib Shah writes for FOX News that researchers from the Media Lab’s Electome project are launching an interactive tool “that compares tweets shared by the White House with a sampling of those shared by the public.”
Scott Clement of The Washington Post writes that researchers at the Laboratory for Social Machines have found that while the majority of Twitter conversation concerning the presidential campaign has centered around Donald Trump over the past week and a half, “battlegrounds differed in what particular issues or themes they focused on.”
MIT researchers have found that immigration has been dominating election conversations on Twitter, writes John West in a Washington Post article. “Tweets on immigration soared to almost 60 percent of the election-related Twitter conversation after Donald Trump’s statements about a potential 'softening', his visit to Mexico and then his address on the topic.”
Using data compiled by the Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines concerning Twitter conversation before and after the mass shooting in Orlando, Aaron Blake of The Washington Post shows that political priorities leading up to the presidential election “may depend heavily on world and domestic events that nobody can predict.”
In an article for Reuters, James Saft writes that MIT researchers have found that analyzing Twitter sentiment can provide useful information for investors. “We exploit a new dataset of tweets referencing the Federal Reserve and show that the content of tweets can be used to predict future returns,” Prof. Andrew Lo and grad student Pablo Azar explain.