After viewers flagged the segment for transgender comments, Twitch banned it Nothing is forever for two weeks. Hartle, embarrassed and apologetic, said he would be more careful in filtering out offensive topics. But he doesn’t promise that Larry will get more humorous material.
Nanyun Peng, assistant professor of computer science at UCLA, researches AI creativity and writes “A unified framework for pun generation with humorous principles” And “Generation Pun with surprise.” She says the AI’s funnyness stems from the fact that it uses probabilistic modeling to determine the most anticipated idea, and that humor is based on unexpected reactions.
That seems like a poor excuse. I worked in the sitcom writers’ room and a lot of the jokes were just math. In theory, one could use machine learning to do this. In fact, Peng once taught an AI model the rules of humor when comedy writers tried to explain it. Theories like the rule of three and the theory of irrationality. She told me: “Our machine can generate ‘The Hound Stops to Cut Rabbit’. I felt so bad for not smiling, it seemed to make her fart. “It’s not that funny. But it is part. When we saw these results, we were so excited.”
The challenge is huge, says Peng. “I don’t think people really understand jokes. There is no theory that you can use them and then you become a standout comic. Some of that is really talent,” she said.
Comedian Whitney Cummings, who made a robot just like her for 2019 Netflix especially, it’s not surprising that the AI tells horrible jokes. “Why are people shocked that robots are not funny? Most people are not funny. “The only funny robot was the Roombas when they got stuck under the couch,” she said.
Cummings is generally in favor of robots; she even keeps her robot version in the house. But she didn’t expect it to make her laugh. “Comedy is one of the few things that characterizes human nature,” she said. “Comedy is about trauma that comes from people’s life experiences and how they deal with it. Robots cannot be injured.”
When I asked Spike Feresten, who wrote for Seinfeld from 1996 to 1998 why do you think Nothing is forever not funny, he suggested asking the AI why it wasn’t funny. But when I login to ChatGPT it says not available due to running out of space. However, oddly enough, the left side of the page gave an explanation of its failure with an AI chat prompted by “Write a comedy routine about the state of ChatGPT.” The closest thing to a joke in there is:
When I sent it to Feresten, he replied, “It’s like asking why Spock isn’t funny.”
In fact, when I could log into ChatGPT later and ask why it wasn’t funny, the bot said essentially the same thing Feresten did, just less funny: “Although AI can recognize patterns and generate responses based on them, it doesn’t have the same sense of humor that humans do. It doesn’t experience emotions, understand context, or capture nuances of language in the same way that humans do.”
However, it still manages to summarize this article in seconds: I should have made more jokes.
