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Can A.I. Be Funny?

Apr 22, 202635 min
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Episode description

Can computers crack jokes? Are comedians in trouble? Jorge talks to an AI expert to find the punchline.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm hoh hitch Cham and today we're asking the question can AI be funny? Sure you can ask chat GPT or Claude to tell you a joke, but are you actually going to laugh? We're gonna talk to an AI expert who's been obsessed with deconstructing humor and teaching it to a computer for the last fifteen years, and she's gonna step us through the rules of what makes something funny, whether AI can follow them, and whether comedians have their

days number. It's a pretty interesting conversation, and I have to warn you there's a lot of laughing at it. It turns out AI researchers can be pretty funny, So get ready to hear the one about the computer scientist walks into a bar with a cartoonist as we answer the question can AI be funny?

Speaker 2

Enjoy?

Speaker 1

Hey everyone, So, I don't know if you've seen this, but the company Anthropic just released the report that shows the jobs that are most likely to be replaced by AI in the coming years. If you're in management, business, computers, engineering, law, even science, it's not looking so good for you. On the other hand, if you're in agriculture, grounds maintenance, or if you know how to fix a fridge or ac you might be okay, which made me wonder where comedians stand.

Some people say that comedy and humor are some of the things that make us uniquely human, but is.

Speaker 2

That really true?

Speaker 1

Can AI be just as funny as people? To answer this question, I reached out to doctor Lydia Chilton, a professor of computer science at Columbia University who specializes in AI and human computer interaction. She also happens to have spent the last fifteen years trying to prove that humor can be done by a computer, because if it can,

it means we actually understand what humor is. Now, doctor Chiltern is gonna tell us whether or not she actually succeeded, but first I wanted to ask her a more basic question, which is what makes something funny? So here's my conversation with doctor Lydia Chilton. Well, thank you doctor Chiltern for joining us.

Speaker 2

Thank you excited to be here.

Speaker 1

I have a joke for you. Here we got knock.

Speaker 2

Who's there?

Speaker 1

Iva?

Speaker 2

Iva? Who?

Speaker 1

I've got a feeling I'm going to need more data to finish this joke.

Speaker 2

All right, you got me that's pretty funny.

Speaker 1

Well, actually I got this one from Gemini, So I asked Gemini right before this call to tell me a knock knock joke about Ai.

Speaker 2

Wow.

Speaker 1

Yeah, go Gemini. Yeah, and you laughed.

Speaker 2

Hi did.

Speaker 1

Well. That brings me to the first question I have for you, which is what makes something funny? M M. Can you pinpoint when you started to get curious about humor?

Speaker 2

Ah, I would say I was five years old and I accidentally made a pun and my dad laughed so hysterically, and I felt so good that I made my dad last and I was like, must repeat, must repeat, And of course it can't happen on command, and that one was an accident. But in order to get people to like me, I've wanted to figure out the formula for a long time and been convinced that there is.

Speaker 1

One, which is a very sweet reason to be interested in the topic.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

I read that in twenty thirteen, you went to the internet and you try to recruit a whole bunch of people from the Internet to give you money to try to answer this question. Can you tell us about that?

Speaker 2

Yeah? So there's some questions that are just so perennial that I can't stop myself from thinking about them. This is one you know, Plato had his set what is good, what is justice? I've got mine what is funny? And I actually think they're kind of the same. You know, not to put me in Plato in the same boat, but right, No, they both have a strong emotional component to them. There's something about the chemicals that happen in

our brain that makes something funny. And that's why something could be different funny for you, for me, for me at a different time, for me if I heard it slightly differently, maybe if someone less funny told it. So it's not all about just the joke and whether the joke was funny. There's a lot of other circumstances, Like the whole thing isn't like logically constructed.

Speaker 1

That bothers you, well, it makes it.

Speaker 2

Very hard to understand. But like, so that could either be a good thing or a bad thing. Like a bad thing if you're like I need to understand this before the test tomorrow, but a good thing. It's like, I would like to study this for eternity because there's gonna.

Speaker 1

Be lots of problems. We may never figure it out. Which gives you, as a professor job security.

Speaker 2

Exactly, exactly. So I talked to a lot of people about this, read a lot of books, because it turns out I wasn't the first person to study humor and a philosopher had a theory about this is at least interesting. It was evolved in us so that we could learn from mistakes of others. Someone else falls on a banana

peel and liked I would not do that. And you know, it's hard to say, but if we're looking back for some origins of why we might have benefited as a species from this, learning from other people's mistakes is a pretty good way of learning rather watching someone else and learning don't step on a banana peel as a positive reward.

Speaker 1

Interesting. Wait, so the theory is that funnyness is basically shot and fraud.

Speaker 2

Yes, yes, shot and freud to make us better In theory.

Speaker 1

Mean he liked a way for your body to feel good at the expense of others, so that we learn from them.

Speaker 2

Yeah. So the next time you see a banana peel, you have that memory because it's a strong positive You're like, oh, that guy felt maybe I won't step on it.

Speaker 1

That's funny. I don't want to be the person people laugh at. Oh interesting, Okay, no one.

Speaker 2

Can prove that's true or not. I can't go back in time twenty thousand years and write down all the banana pe ins.

Speaker 1

It iss although that would be pretty funny, Like.

Speaker 2

Where's the data, It's nowhere. It's a theory.

Speaker 1

It is very complicated and mysterious.

Speaker 2

Humor exactly job security, at.

Speaker 1

Least for now until potentially AIS can do it. So we'll get to that.

Speaker 2

Good.

Speaker 1

Okay, what else did you learn about what makes something funny?

Speaker 2

Well? I read a whole bunch of theories, and there's a lot of different ones, and they all like kind of go together. So one is it has to be surprising. It's not surprising. It's hard to get any kind of emotional reaction out of it. Surprising often is correlated with quick or has a quick turn, and it's like, oh, I'm saying one thing and that boops, just kidding.

Speaker 1

Somebody's walking suddenly they slip in a banana.

Speaker 2

Whoa what exactly? Because you expected them to keep walking and then right very suddenly if they fall very slowly, that's less funny. Yeah, but the most important is it has to be in the subtext of what set So all stories, and I consider jokes stories for small stories have like the text like what said, and then the subtext is what it really means are what the significance

is to it. Typically jokes they have this surprise in them because at first they leave you to believe that there's one subtext, and then something happens you're like, well, now there's a total other subtext.

Speaker 1

I see. It's about our expectation about what's under the surface.

Speaker 2

And how you're interpreting it. So my go to explainer joke for this is here goes there are three kinds of people in the world, people who can count and people who can't. So I led you to believe that I was a person who is intelligent and had three things to say, and then my list too, and you're like, wait, what in your brain kind of rearranges and then you realize, oh, she can't count, she's an idiot, haha, and that's what makes it funny. So those are the two texts.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I was expecting three things. I was surprised when you stopped it two. But then in my brain pieced it together. Oh, it's because she said she must be one of the people who can't count exactly.

Speaker 2

So there's some expectation violation in their expectation violation is one of the main theories, but it's not sufficient. If I just said purple, you weren't expecting me to say purple. But it's not funny, So the subtext is very very important. Okay, that said, farts are also funny, and that doesn't Uh, it's hard to explain that with samantic script theory of humor. I don't know what the subtext the part.

Speaker 1

Is, Well, definitely they're funny, especially if you're ten years old. Yes, maybe the subtext is that you're not supposed to do it in public for others to hear or smell. Yeah, okay, this is going to be a little important later on when we talk about how to get a computer to

be funny. One of the most popular theories about humor is that it violates our expectations in a surprising but not unrelated Wait, so the first part of the joke makes us assume one context, but then something happens and it turns out there was a second hidden way to interpret what was happening, which we had missed. Of course, That's not the only thing that makes something funny.

Speaker 2

There's a lot of other things that make a joke more or less funny. Okay, I call them heighteners. They just heighten the surprise or the level of funny or something about the emotion with them. So one is being mean, Like typically the more mean a joke is the funnier it is until it like really chips over and it's like too soon or like or too.

Speaker 1

Mean, meaning like somebody has to be the butt of the joke.

Speaker 2

Yeah, so mine was mean. I was the butt of my own joke that I can't count. Uh, it's funnier if it's mean.

Speaker 1

It has to say it expose somebody, some person, Yeah, right, Like it can't be about exposing a chair or exposing a material or or something nerds.

Speaker 2

Something related to people. It could be like a group of people, like women or men. There's a lot there's a lot of jokes that take that persuasion.

Speaker 1

And that movie pats into that shout and Freud shot and Freud.

Speaker 2

Yes, schotenfreud of. I don't know it's German. Who knows how to pronounce it? Probably nobody. It's not like there's a country.

Speaker 1

Of people that and that would be a fandfire by my lacke of language skills. But it's like you said, it's about learning from the mistakes of others.

Speaker 2

Yes, exactly interesting, So.

Speaker 1

That makes jokes even funnier.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Another thing that makes them funnier is when you really relate to them, and particularly in an in crowd kind of way, when you're like, oh, I get back. So when someone tells, like a computer science joke that I'm like, ooh, I get it, and I feel special

because the physicists aren't going to get it. And this can be whether it's about our generation, our family, or anything, but inside jokes definitely produce a special kind of chemical that make us feel like we're part of something, and that heightens it.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's funnier.

Speaker 2

It is funny or more emotional, and that heightens the funny.

Speaker 1

Because it exposes something you didn't think anybody else knew, something you should talk about.

Speaker 2

So yeah, part of it is, and Freud talked about this, a part of it is the relief of being able to say something that you might not have otherwise been able to say or reveal. You know, in society we're just to go around and show our best face to people pretend that we're awesome, and to have Instagram pages that makes us look like we're in vacation Italy half

the time. And so when you realize that someone else is also not actually going to Italy, they took one vacation and been dripping the photos throughout the year that yeah, my Instagram page is a lie, and that sense of relief to people that yes, I'm like that too. It rings true. Something being true like it also heightens it. There's like a satisfaction and be like, yeah, that's how

it really is. That person's telling it straight. This was like a mental satisfaction of when you hear something that's true.

Speaker 1

Right right, Like it puts a voice to something you've suspected or felt but never actually maybe put into words before.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Right, And so there's still like a subtext going on there, but the subtext that you're hearing is like, oh, yes, I always wanted someone to admit that airline food is bad. I've never been able to express that before.

Speaker 1

I see keep quing, keep quick.

Speaker 2

Since we've already opened up the topic of fart jokes, things being dirty, sexual body related, all the things that swear words have in common. There's a special part of our brain that is like reserved for like swear words and taboo things. Anytime you light that up, it also sort of magnifies anything, whether it's a joke or a compliment or anything else. It's just a heightener of all kinds. Extra brain cells start firing when you hear those kinds of words. M So try adding a swear word.

Speaker 1

I was gonna say, that is so effing true.

Speaker 2

And that was funny because you did that. There's many things that heighten our emotions or feelings of something. Some people think certain letters and words are very funny. So words with more k's in them will make people laugh more. Maybe I just where's the data? Yeah, there's many many hypotheses out there waiting to be tested about what's funny? Yeah, about what heightens jokes, what makes them funny? Like exactly what kind of subtext is and is not funny? Where in the exact turn is all right?

Speaker 1

So, doctor Chilton spent years studying humor and what makes things funny. She talked to comedians and tapped into the humor science community. Yes there is one, and she came out of it with a bunch of rules about comedy. The next step was to see if she could get a computer to follow those rules. Could an AI be funny? So when we come back, we'll talk about the different ways in which programmers have tried to do that, and with a the joke is on AIS or on us,

So stay with us for the punchline. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about whether AI can be funny, and our guest today is doctor Lydia Chilton. As we mentioned before, in twenty thirteen, she started a project to dissect what makes something funny, not only to understand humor to satisfy her own curiosity, but to see if you could get a computer to be funny. However, not everyone thought it was a good idea.

Speaker 2

Oh I got a lot of hate mail too, but it's the Internet. Of course you're gonna get hate mail. I'm like, how dare you? I thought that was interesting too, that people be offended by this, and I'm like, it's science, you know. So for me, that was the first tip of people being threatened by AI, especially when computers creep into creative areas. I think people kind of get this, but that's mine. I'm a human. I'm creative. That's part of my identity.

Speaker 1

Oh, you got pushback for even kind of trying to dissect it, maybe with the goal of getting computers to do it.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And I was just saying, well, it's just dissecting it, but like, come on, if you dissect it well enough, there's a very high probability that you'll be able to generate it. But these weren't even like honestly comedians were more like, yeah, I kind of want to know this too. They weren't just threatened by it.

Speaker 1

Okay. So despite this pushback, doctor Chilton pressed on. But she needed data on humor, so she turned to The Onion, the humor and satire magazine that's been published since nineteen eighty eight.

Speaker 2

And so someone pointed out to me that The Onion, which is known for making up really funny fake headlines and news stories, also had a different section that was unusual. They took a real headline and came up with three funny man on the street responses to it from average,

usually idiotic Americans. And I liked this as a framework for studying the joke because you could just take the input the original headline, and then you had the Onions like verifiably funny statements, and then you could, with the same headline, come up with your own or try to back engineer the jokes that the onion made to figure out, Okay, what are some of the properties of these jokes, and what are some of the techniques for doing them, and

what's the variety in them. So this little test bed became very important as just a mechanism for which I could sort of study humor in a.

Speaker 1

Bottle and said, what did you learn that experiment you did when in twenty.

Speaker 2

Twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. It kept going because there was a lot to learn, as it turned out, But we did find some things that all the jokes had. All the jokes had at least two connections to the headline. They were taking the original headline and taking the kind of associating things with those entities, with the people mentioned in them, and finding new things to say about them and a new connection between them.

Speaker 1

I see, like you're saying, like finding that other subtics that is surprising.

Speaker 2

Exactly, And then I was like, uh duh. As a computer scientist, I realized I'd kind of been looking in the wrong places. I had been looking for like the logic behind jokes. But I quickly realized that jokes and most human communication is about our loose associations, like why when I think McDonald's, why do I think Burger King? Why do I It's just like they're in the same category. There, It's an association I have. And at the time, computer science was all logic, and so I actually kind of

put the project on a shelf. But I realized, Okay, we need an association engine.

Speaker 1

Okay, let me see if I get this. It was like the twenty early twenty tens. You dissected what humor is. You sort of found all the these patterns and.

Speaker 2

Ye by analyzing the onion.

Speaker 1

By analyzing you peeled back the layers of the onion. Yeah, you found the nuggets, some nuggets and rules, some patterns about what makes something funny. And your goal was to maybe try to get a computer to do this, right.

Speaker 2

Yeah, But it couldn't.

Speaker 1

It couldn't at the time because I think computer science back then and artificial intelligence back then was kind of about setting up the right rules, right.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it was all about logic. It was like, what are the logical rules to do this? How do I add one plus one. I take this bit and I combine it with this bit, and I do an and and that creates two. All of that kind of stuff, But no, like, what do you associate with one? Oh? One is the loneliest number number one, We're number one, Avis is number two. Those are the thoughts that people

have about one that computers have no idea. And it's even hard to get from the Internet, I see because it's the things that people say and not necessarily really the things that people write down. And it's about frequency, like how often it happens, rather than the fact that it did happen.

Speaker 1

Okay, okay, I am getting here to the nugget of the onion here. You sort of figured out that humor was about starting with a subtext that people would recognize, but then being able to find that secondary that other subtexts that will be surprising when you put all the pieces together in the joke.

Speaker 2

Yes, surprising, but still relevant.

Speaker 1

It's still relevant, that's right. Second, suptics and trying to find those subtags is hard if you're just going by the literal definition of worth and using logic, right and things like that.

Speaker 2

Exactly, it's just not there.

Speaker 1

So you start said we can't do this with rules and logic, so you shelved it.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I gave up.

Speaker 1

People weren't convinced that computers could be funny.

Speaker 2

Yes, they weren't convinced that I had decomposed and reconstructed the process of writing humor when humans were still involved in some part of that process.

Speaker 1

Oh, I see, because you still needed some human to direct the computer.

Speaker 2

Like come up with the associations, which is fair, but they're absolutely correct. And then I put this on hold for forever. I was like, never again. I've been burned by this. I will never again grace the universe with my thoughts on humor.

Speaker 1

Humor, this is not funny anymore.

Speaker 2

Exactly, this isn't funny anymore.

Speaker 1

Yes, at this point, computer scientists thought maybe it was impossible to really teach a computer to be funny. But then something changed, something happened that made them think that maybe it is possible for an AI to have a sense of humor. So when we come back, we're gonna talk about what that change was and how it unlocks AI's funny bone forever. So stay with us. We'll be

right back. Hey, we'll come back. We're talking about whether AI can be funny, and we're at the part of the story where computer scientists didn't think it was possible for a computer to make humor. There have been lots of attempts to have computers recognize humor or jokes basically, and they could do pretty well looking for language cues like incongruities or alteration or slang. But could a computer come up with a joke? That was the big question.

Now to understand what was happening at this point with AI and humor, you kind of need to know a little bit of the history of AI. Recovered this in a lot of detail in our February fourth episode about what AI slop is doing to us, So if you want to dig deeper, go check out that episode. But the basic idea is that for a long time, the field of AI was largely based on logic, trying to figure out strategies and algorithms that we thought made things intelligent.

But then in the mid twenty tens, computer scientists figured out a different approach to AI that changed everything. They started to use something new called the transformer, which in turn you sink technique called attention that essentially let computers learn context, and that led to the explosion of AI systems like Chat, GPT, Gemini, Claude. And the key ability here for humor is that these AI systems were built to make associations here tector, Lydia, chiltern.

Speaker 2

So these language models GPT, claw, you know, the thing, the ais that can generate text sort of taken over the universe at this point, for better or for worse, are called man, do I even know what it stands for? Yes? I do. Large language models, so they take basically take in all the text on the internet. They take a sentence, they take the last word out of the sentence and try to predict what that last word would be and guess what that is. That's an association. They go, you

can't do that by logic. You just have to say, like, uh, goodbye, so long don't have you know fun or like have like that's an association. There's no logic that tells you you should do You've just heard it many times before, you repeat it. Kids especially pick up on these things. It's it's just like, well, our brains are hardwired to find these associations and use them.

Speaker 1

So your team was like, we can do it. What was the thing that specifically they thought they could do, or that you could all do.

Speaker 2

Well, we knew that AI could do the associations. What I always told them is we need a new evaluation mechanism. The American Voices section of the Onion that I had used was no longer quite as popular because this was like fifteen years ago. So like, yeah, millennials loved it. Gen Z just does not care. The student was as gen Z as they come, and he's like, well, I know what's funny. Here's what people do. They have a caption contest on Instagram. People post a funny image and

then people try to caption it. We're like, okay, let's go for it. Very similar to what the New Yorker does, but the New Yorker's a hard to capture. And Sean convinced me that j has a very particular flavor of humor.

Speaker 1

So the type of humor that doctor Chiltern and her team decided to see if AI could make was gen Z meme humor. That's when you see an image, let's say, a person with a small hose trying to put out a really large fire, and then someone writes underneath that image to text me trying to put out the dumpster fire of my last relationship. If you're a gen Z that would be hilarious. Okay, here's the experiment, Doctor Chiltern and her team there, they took images and then they

put funny captions to them from three sources. One was real people. The images were put online and then people competed to see who could come up with the funniest caption for them. Where we got the most votes, that's the one that represented how funny humans can be. The second source was Chad GPT. They just asked Chad JPT to come up a funny caption for the image for

a gen Z audience. But then there was a third source of funny captions, which was Chad GBT, but with specific instructions from doctor Chilton and her team on how to make something funny. It prompted Chad GPT to come up with a funny caption for a gen Z audience. But in the prompt it would lay out the rules of humor that doctor Chilton had been researching for years. So step me through those instructions. He said, take this image.

Speaker 2

Yeah, so take this image. So it's an image of like a little guy in the corner with a hose and a big fire down below in the bottom of a canyon. And so, with a dear GPT, please use your vision model and describe this image. And it describes exactly all those things, all these little details. Oh, it says he's on a crane, the sky is blue, which it was. There's lots of trees in the background, all this stuff, some of it useful, some of it not.

You don't know what's going to be useful. And then we say, okay, what are some of the dynamics happening in this image, Like, well, this guy's opting out the fire, but it looks pretty ineffective. The fire's raging through this canyon,

probably going to destroy a lot of things. So it sort of like does when in storytelling is sometimes called world building, like imagine out like not just what scene, but you know some other things surrounding it, Uh huh that could be happening or could happen next, And because you need to start to build a story. Jokes are stories.

Speaker 1

There has to be a world, not just what you see on this image.

Speaker 2

And then you say, now, let's think of an analogy to something that is funny, like relationship drama. Uh huh, and you have AI associate. Okay, what are abstract things that you could put onto a relationship? And it did that part all on its own. It would find many things like you know, me trying to clean up after a relationship. Then like you know, students are all obsessed about their GPA, and it's like, you know, me trying to recover my GPA after I tanked a final.

Speaker 1

It sounds like you were having a conversation with the CHADGBT. Was it a conversation or was this just all in one prompt?

Speaker 2

No, it did it all by it. So it's conversing with itself. That's a big thing that we found was important at the time. GPT. It's unclear that you need it to do that now, but we're like, do step one and then do step two. So like, describe the image, elaborate on that image yourself, come up with figure out what human dynamics you want to map that to make twenty jokes. Evaluate those twenty jokes, tell us which are the five best ones. Yeah, so we put it through a whole series of prompts.

Speaker 1

So you got these three conditions. You got the AI to generate captions with the instructions and then what did you do with the results of all this?

Speaker 2

We showed people the original image. We got lots and lots of people say, hey, here are some captions. Rate them all, and we mixed in the ones we wrote with the generic GPT ones and the human written ones, and every joke got an evaluation how funny is it? On a scale from one to five, And then we could compare. Because people didn't know what condition it was, we like randomized the or so there were no ordering effects. We could compare who's funnier.

Speaker 1

Who's funnier? Well, the internet a chat GPT or a GPT coach to be funny by us.

Speaker 2

So our coached one was definitely funnier than GPT by itself. And we were almost as funny as the humans. In fact, we were not statistically significantly different, which is not the same as saying we were as funny as but you can't prove your so basically we got.

Speaker 1

There pretty much. You were there.

Speaker 2

Yeah, you couldn't tell based on the funniness whether it was written by our decomposed AI version or a human rhote.

Speaker 1

It we were on par meaning that you've proven two things. You've proven that AI can be funny with the instructions, Yes, and that these instructions are a key element of humor. Yes, doctor Chilted as a humorist, as someone who makes a living writing funny things. You just gave me a deep fear.

Speaker 2

Oh excellent. Describe that fear to me.

Speaker 1

You just made me feel like something I've done all my life and that I thought I was good at. Apparently you get just as chet gbt to do, and I'll do it ten times one hundred times faster and maybe better than me.

Speaker 2

Can I play with that thought a little bit? Yeah, because I get this a lot. And anytime AI does a thing like it, writes poetry, the poets go oh no, no, no, I have no value anymore.

Speaker 1

I'm not going to say anything about poetry. We all know what happened to Timothy Shemale. Shemale, Yeah, is that yeah? Or opera. I'm not going to say anything about opera or poetry. Go ahead, yeah, anyway.

Speaker 2

So this is a very common dynamic, Like this is a human thing, Like we all get hyper sensitive about the things that we identify with that we've constructed our identity around and blah blah. We think we're special for we think we're special for And there's a number of ways of thinking about this. So first of all, probably not as special as you think. Now that's it.

Speaker 1

I get it from my kids. Thank you children, thank you. Yes, I think quickly, oh, you're not that funny dead, But.

Speaker 2

Also you're a little bit overestimating AI. So basically, AI in this instance did find one way to fairly reliably be funny. That does not mean it can do it in every situation, that it can do it for every person. Like also, humor is very situational. We want to talk to one another and have jokes about what we're talking about in our lives. This is one like small sliver

of the joke universe. And so yes, although I definitely see it trigger alarm bells and people's mind I would say you're both probably overestimating how much of a special snowflake you are, but you're definitely extrapolating on how strong AI is to be funny given all different contexts and importances or important dimensions and places of being funny, like at the right time, with the right place, to the right person without being too offensive. So it's not like

it's solved. It's more of like an existence proof that something is possible in this space. Should we be worried? I don't know. No one will ever be funny again because now AI does it, and the humans will lose their ability to be funny. I don't see that happening.

Speaker 1

I feel like maybe you hit it a little bit on the head a moment ago when you said that part of what we're seeking here is human connection, and a lot of what we find funny is maybe they're more special, or they hit us more. If another person says, I don't know, what do you think?

Speaker 2

Yeah, it's certainly social. There's something very special about what a person, especially a person we like or admire, says something to us. And even to have someone that you like make a joke about you, it has a meaning and a subtext beyond just like, oh you know, she thinks that I farted or whatever. Like it means that they like you, that there's a bond between you, and you're not going to feel that with Ai. God, I hope you won't feel it.

Speaker 1

Meaning there's hope in this sense. Or maybe I don't know if we need hope, but we want to hear humor from other people. Yeah, or it's maybe it's funnier or more special if another person says it or is behind it.

Speaker 2

Yeah. So if we brought jokes to storytelling, I've really realized that AI has nothing to say. The heart of a story is having something to say, some actual subtext that you believe in. And when you tell me a joke that comes from your background, that's maybe my shared background. Maybe how awful it is getting a PhD, and how it really feels like the machine is punching you down.

Like I realize that you have been through that and you have this thing to say, and I feel it too, And I think that's that having something to say is the most important part of human creation.

Speaker 1

Right now, I feel like you're saying that AI can be funny, but right now, at least you can't have to tell it how to be funny. Yeah, And if you're telling it how to be funny, maybe by then the joke is old. It's like people will see through and say, oh, this is just following that pattern that I've seen a million times. Yes, exactly, all right. To end here, I asked Gemini, tell me a joke about a computer scientist who's trying to make AI funny. Do you want to hear it.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yes, here it is.

Speaker 1

A computer scientist spent years training a massive neural network to have the perfect sense of humor. On the day of the big reveal, she invited the press and typed the prompt tell me a joke, the AI word, and finally it replied, your life. The scientist was horrible. It doesn't It doesn't end there.

Speaker 2

It keeps going, doesn't. Oh good? Oh good. I was hoping it would keep going.

Speaker 1

The scientist was horrified. That's not funny. That's just mean. Why would you say that. The AI blinked its cursor calmly and responded, because I've seen your source code.

Speaker 2

Hmmm, it's not for me. Maybe everyone else will think it's funny.

Speaker 1

We need more data, We need more data.

Speaker 2

The first one was funny, get your life?

Speaker 1

No, no, oh they knock dock joke. Yeah, maybe I should stick to knockout jokes. Is the lesson here? All right, Hey, thanks for joining us, See you next time you've been listening to science stuff. Production of iHeartRadio Bring Them Produced by Me or Hey Cham edited by Rose Seguda. He said gative producer Jerry Rowland, an audio engineer and mixer. Kasey Peckram. You can follow me on social media to search for PhD comics in the name of your favorite platform.

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