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.
