Artificial intelligence is prolific. It can write academic papers, diagnose illnesses, and power self-driving cars. But fortunately for those who fear the robots will one day take over, there's one field where it's completely useless: humor. That should be heartening for comedy writers who worry that AI will take over their already scarce jobs. “ChatGPT has no childhood trauma,” read one writer's sign at a writers' union strike last year, a slogan for those who don't believe AI can produce meaningful art.
Ask an AI to say something funny, and it will spit out clichés. “In one 2023 study, when researchers asked ChatGPT for 1,008 'original' jokes, over 90% of the responses were the same 25 jokes…none of them were original,” the researchers say. MashableAI is interesting Unintentionally — “like the insouciant ‘straight man’ of sketch comedy” — but that’s another story entirely.So why is it that artificial intelligence, with all its infinite knowledge, can’t make us laugh?
Why can't AI be fun?
Comedy is situational, contextual, and sophisticated. Even a simple meme requires multiple layers of understanding to be “understood.” Ishani Priyadarshini, who completed her PhD at the University of Delaware in 2021, wrote a thesis on AI's seeming inability to decipher memes. Popular Mechanics“Internet memes act as a great checkpoint to ensure that humans gain the upper hand over machines,” Priyadarshini told the outlet.
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Humor is subjective, but AI has no subjectivity or personal feelings. The best comedies are peppered with emotional truth, but as the Writers Guild sign says, AI has no childhood trauma, no wellspring of empathy, and no real-life experience to draw from. “The prevalence of bad jokes relies on a codified pattern-recognition process, so large language models can be taught to rapidly churn out passable formulaic material,” the AI's creator said. The Hollywood Reporter. “but, [experts] “We believe that original, groundbreaking comedy is likely to remain outside the confines of such machine concepts, at least in the short term.”
Another challenge: Many comedy routines push the boundaries of decorum. Political correctnessMeanwhile, “AI is a conservative technology, and it doesn't know what the taboos are, so it can't break them,” Guy Hoffman, a professor at Cornell University, told the Reporter. AI is programmed to follow established norms, so it has a hard time ignoring them.
Will AI evolve into something interesting?
Some experts believe AI could make advances. John In 2020, as part of his research at Oregon State University, he performed a stand-up tour, but his setlists were written and programmed by humans. Tony Veal, a professor at University College Dublin and author of Your Wit Is My Command: Building AIs With a Sense of Humor, told reporters, “It's possible to evolve humor with something like the ChatGPT model, by programming it to prioritize contradictions and deviations from established norms, which are hallmarks of comedy.”
“Language models use probability to guide choices,” Veal told the outlet, “and because mainstream theories of humor are concerned with taking an idea and subverting it, we can adjust that probability control from the expected to the unexpected.”
AI hasn't been given the time that most comedians spend years honing their craft at open mics before they find success. Still, some experts say humans have a clear advantage. “It's a little like an alien watching stand-up comedy and saying, 'Oh, I can do that too. I think I see a pattern,'” Mark Riedl, a professor at Georgia Tech's Center for Machine Learning, told Mashable. “But [the alien] They don't realize that there's so much more going on in the comedian's mind and in the audience's mind.”
Trust is another factor: “Studies show that people rate humor as one of the jobs that humans are much better able to hand over to AI, alongside news writing, music composition and truck driving (all of which AI has had some success at), ” Time magazine notes.
AI's evolution into funniness could pose a problem, as its mediocre jokes may eventually become so popular that they cost comedians their jobs. “Experts agree that while AI is clearly a threat to the workforce, it will become a fundamental tool for comedians, like a thesaurus or a search engine,” the reporter said.
