AI learns how to be happy or sad by watching the opening bit from Pixar's Up

Researchers are using Disney movies to try and teach artificial intelligence about common human emotions such as happiness, anger and sadness.

A joint effort between MIT's Lab for Social Machines and McKinsey's Consumer tech and Media team, the AI was shown thousands of movies and eventually started to track human emotion. According to Gizmodo, the AI was less interested in the story's highs and lows as it was the emotional moments.

AI watched the opening scene to Up – which is capable of drawing emotion from anyone –and was able to create a higher emotional response to the more important segments. The opening scene is worth re-watching above.

When the Up couple are thinking about having children, the AI had its happiest response, .65 out of a maximum 1 (The higher the number, the more positive the reaction). And when Carl returns home after Ellie dies, its reaction was around .38, which is accurate for a sad moment. You can see a full range of the reaction below.

For accurate readings, people watched the movies and made a note of their emotions in certain scenes. Labels were also included to reference emotion-invoking aspects of the films, such as music.

"Think about this for a moment: machines can view an untagged video and create an emotional arc for the story based on all of its audio and visual elements," the report states. "That's something we've never seen before."

While AI continues to learn emotions, it has also been busy writing new chapters of Harry Potter. Using predictive text, an AI bot has managed to pen an entire chapter of the popular wizards book. It analysed the original seven books to create a chain of predicted words. While it does make sense from a grammatical perspective, the chapter's story is something else entirely.