# Creative Captioning: An AI Grand Challenge Based on the Dixit Board Game

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.00048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00048/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [Know your audience: specializing grounded language models with listener subtraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08349/) (2022)
- [Can They Dixit? Yes they Can! Dixit as a Playground for Multimodal Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19892/) (2025)
- [Calibrated Ambiguity in Multimodal Language Models: Humans reach for cultural references, while models describe the picture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12575/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a new class of "grand challenge" AI problems that we call creative captioning---generating clever, interesting, or abstract captions for images, as well as understanding such captions. Creative captioning draws on core AI research areas of vision, natural language processing, narrative reasoning, and social reasoning, and across all these areas, it requires sophisticated uses of common sense and cultural knowledge. In this paper, we analyze several specific research problems that fall under creative captioning, using the popular board game Dixit as both inspiration and proposed testing ground. We expect that Dixit could serve as an engaging and motivating benchmark for creative captioning across numerous AI research communities for the coming 1-2 decades.