An investigation by Disney Research has resulted in a system capable of judging what is the quality of a story and a narrative.
One of the sacred differences between humans and robots, according to popular knowledge, is that the latter cannot create. This artistic vein is the stronghold that will remain for people in the future. Creativity as self-affirmation, as a symbol of the soul. And yet, already there are artificial intelligences that approach creation.
One of the latest studies by Disney Research, the research arm of the entertainment company, goes in this direction. A team of scientists has proposed discover if an AI algorithm can judge the quality of a story. The aim is that in the future such a system will be able to evaluate scripts and proposals on a massive scale.
For the research, Disney Research has created a neural network (deep learning) that has finally been successful in judging stories. Those responsible for the project admit that the software is not prepared to serve as a judge in a literary contest, but yes serves as a guide or first opinion about a proposal.
Needless to say, the quality of a story is very subjective. Sometimes not even the big publishers have known how to see the potential of a book as happened with one of the great best-sellers of the twentieth century, “The Conspiracy of Fools”, by John Kennedy Toole, which was systematically rejected. Nor have the authors always been able to see the interest of their texts. García Márquez was a nervous wreck when he presented ” Cien años de soledad “to the publishing house, while José Cela threw the manuscript of” La colmena”, which his first wife Rosario Conde saved from the flames, into the fireplace.
To provide criteria to their neural network, scientists they have turned to Quora. This fascinating portal of questions and answers, whose methodology looks like a memory of the Internet in the 90s, has invaluable knowledge. At least they’ve seen it in Disney Research. Many answers are written as a story, with clear narrative elements.
Thus, Disney Research has looked at the answers that obtained the most votes as an indicator of quality, narrative and background. Researcher have studied more than 28,300 answers to feed your neural network. It evaluates parts of the stories to find a relationship between them, but it also does so from a general perspective. This way, the algorithm has the full picture.
In the tests researchers have proven that the neural network can predict how many votes an answer has in Quora. So I would be understanding which elements make a story popular and which ones prevent it.
Judge the quality of a written story is the first step before writing a. If Disney expects that in the future some stories will be created by artificial intelligence, has taken the first step to achieve it. It wouldn’t be so strange. After all there are already artificial intelligences that have created works, such as the Aiva algorithm, whose music has intellectual property rights.
Images: Disney, liveoncelivewild
