Disney's AI Judges Short Stories; What's Next For Story Writers?

Artificial intelligence is crossing new barriers every day -- while some tech companies are working on giving it imagination, others are working on making it capable of even more complex tasks -- for instance, judging short stories. A new study by Disney's research team and researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Boston has attempted to create artificial intelligence which will be able to understand and evaluate short stories. "Our neural networks had some success in predicting the popularity of stories. You can't yet use them to pick out winners for your local writing competition, but they can be used to guide future research," stated Boyang Li, a research scientist at Disney Research. The target of the research is to create an AI-based automated evaluation of content, although it does not have a reference point of large human evaluated story databases since not many exist.