Researchers Used 'Up' to Teach AI How to Feel

When I'm walking down the street and something poetic happens--sunlight piercing rainclouds, golden leaves dancing in an autumn wind--I just go "ehh." But human emotion is quantifiable, meaning it can be taught to computers. A collaboration between MIT's Lab for Social Machines and McKinsey's Consumer Tech and Media team want to use film to quantify and "teach" emotions to computers in order to create AI that can tell emotional stories. How do you teach emotions to AI? Make them watch movies. MIT's machine learning model reviewed "thousands" of movies and eventually became able to track and label emotional arcs--not story beats exactly, but the shifts from happy to sad a viewer might feel as they watch the movie.