IBM's AI automatically generates creative captions for images

Writing photo captions is a monotonous -- but necessary -- chore begrudgingly undertaken by editors everywhere. Fortunately for them, though, AI might soon be able to handle the bulk of the work. In a paper ("Adversarial Semantic Alignment for Improved Image Captions") appearing at the 2019 Conference in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Long Beach, California this week, a team of scientists at IBM Research describes a model capable of autonomously crafting diverse, creative, and convincingly humanlike captions. Architecting the system required addressing a chief shortcoming of automatic captioning systems: sequential language generation resulting in syntactically correct -- but homogeneous, unnatural, and semantically irrelevant -- structures. The coauthors' approach gets around this with an attention captioning model, which allows the captioner to use fragments of scenes in the photos it's observing to compose sentences.