New Artificial Intelligence Can Tell Stories Based on Photos

Artificial intelligence may one day embrace the meaning of the expression "A picture is worth a thousand words," as scientists are now teaching programs to describe images as humans would. Someday, computers may even be able to explain what is happening in videos just as people can, the researchers said in a new study. Computers have grown increasingly better at recognizing faces and other items within images. Recently, these advances have led to image captioning tools that generate literal descriptions of images. Now, scientists at Microsoft Research and their colleagues are developing a system that can automatically describe a series of images in much the same way a person would by telling a story.