AI as Funny as Humans for Generating Image Captions

It’s possible to get grad-school credit for writing memes. At least if you use deep learning to do it. Just ask Lawrence Peirson. The 23-year-old is pursuing a theoretical astrophysics Ph.D. at Stanford, but decided to enroll in a couple AI courses this year. He and classmate E. Meltem Tolunay came up with a neural network that captions memes for a class project, now published in a whitepaper aptly titled “Dank Learning.” (“Dank,” for the uninitiated, is a synonym for “cool.”)