Disney Is Developing an AI That Can Judge What Makes For a Truly Great Story

Disney's cuddly toys of the future could be smart enough to pick out the perfect bedtime story, thanks to a clever new artificial intelligence engine that's been trained to judge short works of fiction. Using neural networks designed to mimic the learning processes of human brains, the AI was trained using sample stories to recognise particular traits and patterns that would appeal to a broad range of readers. The team from Disney Research and the University of Massachusetts Boston says it's the first large-scale study of its kind on getting bots to evaluate the quality of texts, and could eventually lead to AI systems that are able to tell a good story as well as spot one in a crowd of literary tales. "Our neural networks had some success in predicting the popularity of stories," says one of the team, Boyang Albert Li from Disney Research. "You can't yet use them to pick out winners for your local writing competition, but they can be used to guide future research."