Writing stories can be a tricky thing because most of the time what we imagine in our heads sometimes doesn’t translate so well when written out. Then there is also the case of ego, where sometimes we think what we write is unique and will become the next best-selling book of the current generation.
That’s where editors and publishers come in, where they can offer advice and also evaluate stories to see if they’re worth publishing. However it can be a rather tedious process, especially with all the manuscripts being sent in on a daily basis, but the folks at Disney Research have developed an AI that can potentially be used to determine if a short story is good or not.
According to Boyang “Albert Li” who is a research scientist at Disney Research, “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.” Basically it sounds like the AI can tell if a story will be popular or not, as opposed to whether or not it will win any awards for its writing (some books don’t read so well, but can still be popular due to the current trend).
In order to determine whether a story is popular, researchers had to first train the AI to understand popularity, which they turned to Quora and used the platform’s upvoting system as a measure of popularity. We’re not sure what the plans are for such a system, but presumably it could be used to help vet movie scripts in the future. With robots already acting in movies, we guess having AI choose our scripts next doesn’t really seem like a stretch.
Filed in . Read more about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Disney.