If you're at a loose end tonight and looking for a suitably spooky pastime for Halloween, you might want to check out what's going on at the MIT Media Lab.
In a project called BeeMe, an actor will give up their free will and allow members of the public to control their every action.
"The event will follow the story of an evil AI by the name of Zookd, who has accidentally been released online," the researchers explain.
"Internet users will have to coordinate at scale and collectively help the actor (also a character in the story) to defeat Zookd. If they fail, the consequences could be disastrous."
The public can suggest what the actor should do next, for example visiting a particular place. Other people can then upvote or downvote these suggestions, with the top-rated command being carried out.
"See what I see. Hear what I hear. Control my actions. Take my will. Be me," the project's slogan reads.
All this sounds like asking for trouble. Who can forget Tay, for example, the AI chatbot released on Twitter by Microsoft eighteen months ago? After being primed by statements made to it by members of the public, it took very little time before it started tweeting racist and inflammatory messages.
However, the MIT team is embracing the risk.
"BeeMe will redefine the way in which we understand social interactions online and in real life," they say. "It will push crowdsourcing and collective intelligence to the extreme to see where it breaks down."
And, they say, the actor won't carry out any commands that are illegal or dangerous, or that compromise his or her dignity or privacy - so at least the game won't descend into a a grubby porn session.
The MIT Media Lab has a tradition of creating spooky projects for Halloween. In 2016, researchers created an AI program called Nightmare Machine, which used crowd-sourced ideas of what makes an image frightening to convert normal photos into into spine-chilling pictures.
Last year, the group followed up with another AI program called Shelley that used similar techniques to create original horror stories.
BeeMe will begin at 11pm local time on Wednesday, 31 October (3am GMT on Thursday, 1 November). To join in, visit beeme.online. The team says that if tonight is a success, they plan to open the platform up for users to create their own stories in future.
