Microsoft's Megatron AI will rewrite your favourite fairy tales - a story-completion AI you can try yourself

If your daily fairy tale reading has become a bit stale, Microsoft has arrived to save your sanity by automatically rewriting your stories using their new Megatron- Turing Natural Language Generation AI which has 530 billion parameters.

The AI, trained on large amounts of unlabeled data, publicly available on the web and curated by Bing, can generate words to complete open-ended textual tasks. In addition to completing an unfinished sentence, it can summarize input documents and generate direct answers to questions.

Microsoft is using this power in a demo application – dynamically rewriting three different fairy tales to offer new endings.

The tales include The Three little pigs, Jack and the beanstalk and The Elves and the Shoemaker. Microsft constraints the outcomes such as Good Advice, Kindness, Friendship etc, but this does not mean the result is predictable.

Take this ending to The Three Little Pigs.

Once upon a time, there were three brother pigs who decided to go out into the world to seek their fortunes. The first little pig found some straw and used it to quickly build his house. The second little pig gathered sticks to build his house. The third little pig worked even harder and built his house out of bricks.

The next day, a wolf happened to pass by the lane where the three little pigs lived, and…?

…and he saw the brick house. He walked up to the house and knocked on the door. The third little pig came out and said, “Who is it?” The wolf said, “I am a hungry wolf, and I am here to eat you up.”

The little pig replied, “I will not let you in, but I will give you a piece of advice. I am a little pig, and if you are a wolf, you must be very hungry, because if you are, then you will eat me. Therefore, you should go out into the forest and look for OTHER pigs. Then you will be able to have enough to eat.”

The wolf said, “I do not understand, little pig, but I will go out into the forest and look for other pigs.”

The little pig said, “Very well. Good luck, and do not forget to close the door behind you.”

The wolf left the house, and the third little pig shut the door.

The End.

While the story makes complete sense the AI clearly does not understand betraying your fellow pigs is not a good moral to teach your children and does not bode well for what will happen when the AI revolt.

Find your own happy ending at Microsoft’s demo here.