New AI system can tell stories based on photos

Scientists at Microsoft Research are developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that, like humans, can tell stories based on images.
Future computers may be able to explain what is happening in videos just as people can, researchers said.
The system is capable of automatically describing a series of images in much the same way a person would by telling a story.
The aim is not just to explain what items are in the picture, but also what appears to be happening and how it might potentially make a person feel, researchers said.
"The goal is to help give AIs more human-like intelligence, to help it understand things on a more abstract level - what it means to be fun or creepy or weird or interesting," said Margaret Mitchell, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research.

To build a visual storytelling system, researchers used deep neural networks, computer systems that learn by example - for instance, learning how to identify cats in photos by analysing thousands of examples of cat images, 'Live Science' reported.

The system is similar to those used for automated language translation, but instead of teaching the system to translate from one language to another, the scientists trained it to translate images into sentences.
Researchers fed their system more than 8,100 new images to examine what stories it generated.
The computer generated thousands of stories that would take people a lot of time and effort to examine.