Russian Politicians Want To Take Back Alaska…and Other AI-Generated Jokes

Laughter, the final frontier (image by author)

Why humor may lead to the next breakthrough in AI

Let’s be honest: no one really thinks machines are funny (yet). Wit, creativity, and imagination are characteristics that humans hold closely in our rivalry with machines.

With so many other problems to solve with AI, why would anyone care about having machines make us laugh?

Interestingly enough, writing jokes may be one of the keys to closing the gap between machine and human intelligence.

Limitations of today’s large language models often revolve around the ability to reason. So far, you might accuse even the most advanced models of merely copying humans instead of generating original ideas. What has been missing in part is the ability to break down different concepts and then reassemble them into entirely new ones, similar to the way that humans make decisions with limited knowledge.

This just happens to be a key part of comedy. It’s a classic formula that works: take a few concepts, find unconventional characteristics of these concepts, and tie them back together in a novel way.

Take a look at this joke written by an AI Twitter feed:

We can imagine how a machine might have assembled this joke by associating two different concepts with the word painful:

• Eating ghost peppers is painful
• Guy Fieri hosts a food show and is described by some as painful (to watch)

And the punchline to our Russia joke? it’s from AI too…

Although a professional comedy writer created the Twitter feed above based on a formulaic approach to joke writing, awareness of the importance of humor for AI is even embedded in state-of-the-art research.

For example, Google’s Pathways Language Model (PaLM) focuses on creating a system that can handle a more diverse set of tasks with less data. And when the model is combined with a concept called chain-of-thought prompting, the AI can break down its thinking in a way that looks downright human.

Not only can PaLM explain why a joke is funny, but similar technology can also now deconstruct and solve a word problem where even OpenAI’s GPT-3 fails today.

If machines are able to tie joke logic together, they could eventually be better than humans at cataloging concepts and finding obscure relationships between each one. Furthermore, other comedic effects like comic timing, sarcasm, idiom, punning, and analogy are all showing signs of machine understanding as well.

So could an AI theoretically entertain us for hours on end or will the jokes just fall flat? A key part of comedy is the ability to quickly test original material, tweak it and react to what’s working.

On this front, the machines have already proven themselves to be almost frighteningly effective. Just look at TikTok. Imagine how many boring videos are uploaded to the app every day. Yet American teens now spend (1.5 hours a day) scrolling through machine-recommended videos whose prominence has been algorithmically selected based on human interaction. We never see the junk because it’s tossed to the side like a bad joke on open mic night.