This AI Watched 100 Films to Learn How to Recognize a Kiss

A senior data scientist at Netflix trained an AI to detect kissing scenes in films—and had to take precautions to make sure the model didn’t confuse kissing with sex

Like someone who has never been kissed, AI began learning the basics by binge-watching romantic film clips to see how Hollywood stars lock lips. By training deep learning algorithms that have already proven adept at recognizing faces and objects to also recognize steamy kissing scenes dramatized by professional actors, a data scientist has shown how AI systems could gain greater insight into the most intimate human activities.