When we encounter artificial intelligence in the media, it's often discussed at extremes. At one end, there are films, books, games and even news commentary that paint a picture of a world-ending intelligence. At the other end, people picture algorithms so powerful they can solve every major problem facing mankind. In reality, the capabilities for AI lie somewhere in between. For example, some of Elsevier's products use machine-learning driven image identification to better diagnose life-threatening illnesses – but these are tools are designed to aid the deductive work of human experts, not replace them.

Morals are an important part of many stories, and central to why storytelling developed in the first place as a means of communication. They have the potential to provide a framework for developing story structure, which could be utilised by modern storytelling systems. To achieve this we need a general representation for morals. We propose patterns of character emotion as a suitable foundation. In this paper, we categorise Aesop’s fables based on the morals they convey, and use them as a source of emotion data corresponding to those morals. We use inductive logic programming to identify relationships between particular patterns of emotion and the morals of the stories in which they arise.