Will Artificial Intelligence Win the Caption Contest?

They tell a story, which gives the photos context and additional emotional meaning. A paper published by Microsoft Research describes an image captioning system that mimics humans' unique style of visual storytelling. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have spent years teaching computers to label the contents of images, but this new research takes it a step further by teaching a neural-network-based system to infer a story from several images. Someday it could be used to automatically generate descriptions for sets of images, or to bring humanlike language to other applications for artificial intelligence. "Rather than giving bland or vanilla descriptions of what's happening in the images, we put those into a larger narrative context," says Frank Ferraro, a Johns Hopkins University PhD student who coauthored the paper.