One of China's top tech companies is trying to push the frontiers of artificial intelligence by teaching computers to understand scenes from the 1990's romance-disaster epic Titanic.

The technology, from China company SenseTime, is supposed to distinguish Titanic's romantic scenes from disaster scenes. Although most humans would have no problem distinguishing Jack and Rose's blooming love from the Titantic’s sinking, the feat is highly complex for computers.

In a demonstration at MIT Technology Review‘s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco on Monday, the technology performed well and was able to classify the scenes correctly. It highlights the advancement of artificial intelligence, but also how far it still has to go before becoming able to understand more complex movie scenes outside of public demonstrations.

Dahua Lin, the director of a joint research lab between SenseTime and the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he’s also an assistant professor, played a video of the scene from Titanic in which Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) gently holds Rose (Kate Winslet) as she leans over the bow of the doomed passenger ship like she’s flying. Beneath the video was a small chart indicating whether the company's computers thought the scene was romantic or action-packed.

After crunching data, presumably taken from thousands of videos and image stills in video clips, the computer determined that the scene was more "romantic" than a "disaster." Then later, when Lin briefly showed the clip of the Titanic sinking, the computers quickly identified the scene as more of a "disaster" than "romantic."

Advances in AI technologies like deep learning have led to researchers "training" computers to understand objects in photos and videos. SenseTime's computers, at least as demonstrated, appear to be able to understand the context behind video clips besides merely identifying the objects. U.S. tech companies like , are also reportedly exploring the use of AI in similar ways to parse videos and then show viewers promotional clips filled with scenes more likely to appeal to them.