Microsoft researchers are teaching AI to write stories about groups of photos

Microsoft researchers have come up with a novel way to have computers tell stories about what's happening in multiple photographs using artificial intelligence (AI). Today the company is publishing an academic paper describing the technology, which could one day power services that are especially useful to the visually impaired, as well as the photos, captions, and "stories" developed in the research. The work is significant because it goes well beyond just identifying objects in images, or even videos, in order to generate captions. "It's still hard to evaluate, but minimally you want to get the most important things in a dimension. With storytelling, a lot more that comes in is about what the background is and what sort of stuff might have been happening around the event," Microsoft researcher Margaret Mitchell told VentureBeat in an interview.