Judging a Book by Its Cover: AI Can Now Tell What's on the Inside by Looking at the Outside

Book covers are usually designed to reflect what the book is all about -- which isn't exactly in line with the famous saying about judging a book by its cover. Now, a pair of researchers from Kyushu University in Japan wanted to find out just how well artificial intelligence (AI) can engage in the proverbial book judging. It turns out, neural networks perform fairly well. The task was simple: can a deep neural network, which has four layers of up to 512 neurons each, correctly identify what genre a book belongs to just by analyzing its cover? They trained their neural network using 80 percent of this data to recognize a book's genre by looking at the cover image.