Humor, a quintessential aspect of human nature, is often considered beyond the realm of algorithms. Yet, the question persists: Can the essence of humor be captured and codified? Let's delve into the intriguing intersection of humor and artificial intelligence.

“Codifying Humanity” is a new Neural series that analyzes the machine learning world’s attempts at creating human-level AI.

A robot walks into a bar and the bartender takes its order. The robot says: “I’ll have whatever my developer likes.”

  • Humorous or not, the premise of the joke is that robots don’t have personalities, ideas, thoughts, or desires. Any human-like qualities we could attribute to a machine or its output are merely reflections of ourselves or its programmers.

What is funny?

Jokes can be reduced to formulas, but “funny” isn’t a thing. It’s a perception.

  • If you want to teach an AI to be funny, you have to train it on things that are funny (i.e. pictures of cats).

Who decides?

It’s subjective.

  • A coalition of world-recognized funny people could create a database of Mad Libs they find hilarious, yet there’s no guarantee any given person would get a chuckle out of any of them
  • Funny as interpreted by the recipient of a joke is subjective, and funny as an intended construct requires intent
  • Being funny is as complex as the people you surround yourself with
  • What a group of AI devs might find funny or fashionable differ from what people find funny

Prestidigitation

Much like a real-world magician, developers create incredible programs out of some fairly basic algorithmic foundations. The only difference between a disappearing coin trick and what David Copperfield does is scale.

  • There is no more or less “real magic” involved in the former’s illusions and the latter’s.

Can an AI be funny?

Nabil Hossain and a pair of Microsoft AI researchers developed a machine learning system to generate humorous headlines from existing news articles.

  • The AI picks a noun or verb from a headline and replaces it with a word that can be objectively quantified as humorous.

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