https://time.com/6132544/artificial-intelligence-humor/
"Don’t you hate it,” says Jon the Robot, gesturing with tiny articulated arms
at an expectant crowd, “when you’re trying to solve inverse kinematics
equations to pick up a cup and then you get ‘Error 453, no solution found’?”
The crowd laughs. “Don’t you hate that?”
An experiment billed as a comedy act, Jon is the brainchild of Naomi Fitter, an
assistant professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing
Engineering at Oregon State University. The tiny android performs when a
handler (who must also hold the mic) presses a button, then tells the same
jokes in the same order, like a grizzled veteran comic at a down-market Vegas
casino.
But the robot’s act is more human than it might first appear. Jon is learning
how to respond to its audience—it can now vary the timing of its delivery based
on the length of the audience’s laughter, and append different responses to
jokes based on the level of noise in the room. It can deliver one line if a
joke gets a roar of laughter (“Please tell the booking agents how funny that
joke was”) and another if there are crickets (“Sorry about that. I think I got
caught in a loop. Please tell the booking agents that you like me … that you
like me … that you like me”).
The prospect of an AI that understands why we are laughing, and that can
generate its own genuinely funny material, is sort of a holy grail for a subset
of AI researchers. Artificial intelligence can diagnose tumors, read maps and
play games, often faster and with more accuracy than humans can.
For the moment, however, linguistic humor is still primarily a people thing.
Jon can work blue, with a whole bit on robot dating that involves cryptic
texts, encrypted text, and the eggplant emoji—but only because a human has
written and programmed a set list for it. Finding a way to teach machines to be
funny on their own would be a major breakthrough—one that could fundamentally
reshape the way we relate to the devices around us. To understand a person’s
humor is to know what they like, how they think and how they see the world. An
AI that understands all that has the power to do a lot more than just crack
jokes."
Via Wayne Radinsky and Christoph S.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
