Does AI Have a Sense of Humor?

Author(s): Ritvik Nayak

Originally published on Towards AI.

Humour is arguably one of the more complicated and elusive parts of human cognition: a subtle art behind making people laugh, related to culture, context, and timing. But in an era dominated by AI-enabling machines to generate text, solve problems, and even create art, a constant question arises: Does AI have a true sense of humor?

The Building Blocks of Humour

Before seeking an explanation of whether AI can truly be funny, it is important to reverse-engineer what humor really is. Essentially, humor is about cognitive dissonance—a playful clash between expectations and reality. A jokester takes his audience down one path, then-whoa!-there comes a twist. This surprise, which defies the audience’s expectations but isn’t harmful, causes laughter.

There are also different forms of humor, ranging from simple slapstick to sophisticated wordplay, satire, or irony. Can AI, as a pattern-recognition machine, master these forms, or is humor something uniquely human?

Strengths of AI: Pattern Recognition and Joke Generation

AI, especially large language models like GPT-4, is all about the patterns. It has huge datasets of human language to learn from, find patterns, and generate text based on the prompts given. Because of this, AIs can already make jokes-at least on a basic level. For example, many AI-generated jokes follow standard setups:

“Why don’t scientists trust atoms?

Because they make up everything.”

This kind of joke works because it’s common for the AI to learn certain templates for jokes and fill in the blank. While it can produce this sort of humor, it is important to note that AI actually isn’t understand the humor. It doesn’t find the punchline funny, it’s just replicating patterns that it found in training data.

Can AI Understand Context and Culture?

The most slippery part of humor seems to be the context in which it is delivered. What is funny within one culture or even within one social group can be insulting or completely misunderstood within another. Human humor takes shape by means of common experiences, societal mores, and moving trends. So, does AI get it?

Well, not really. While the AI can mimic cultural humor by borrowing from pre-existing jokes, AI lacks real cultural sensitivity regarding more advanced and context-specific humor. For example, sarcasm is far more apt to rely on knowing when to say what while meaning the opposite—it may easily trip up AI. If the intrinsic understanding of human emotion or societal norms is lacking in the AI, then it might give a punchline which is inappropriate or out-of-place.

Humor and Emotional Intelligence

However, humor is not all about a quick-witted one-liner; it involves timing and empathy, too. A good comedian knows when to crack a joke, how to feel the room, and how to tailor humor to his audience. The ability is again derived from emotional intelligence, which by design, AI lacks. While AI can make jokes or even imitate humor, it cannot sense the emotional atmosphere nor react in real-time to audience feedback.

Emotional intelligence also controls the therapeutic function of humor. Laughter relieves tension, cements relationships, or offers a coping mechanism. A human comedian might use humor in order to console; an AI would most likely fall terribly short in replicating such emotionally fine-tuned moments. An AI lacks an intuitive understanding of when humor helps—and when it hurts.

Can Machines Ever Be Truly Funny? 😁😂

While AI humor is still in its infancy, there is certainly room for growth. As LLMs continue to improve and as AI systems become increasingly adept at parsing natural language and context, the jokes AI will hopefully generate someday can actually be more clever, nuanced, and context-sensitive. In fact, humor may prove to be one of those milestones in making interactions with AI even more human-like.

But the real question isn’t whether AI can make jokes funny, but whether AI can feel humor. At its core, humor is an extremely subjective and emotive response. AI doesn’t have the ability to have emotions or that sense of absurdity that makes humor so appealing. As long as machines cannot “experience” something themselves, their humor will somewhat be an empty shell of mimicked human wit but never truly participatory.

A Closing Thought

So, does AI have a sense of humor? The short answer is no. It can create jokes, follow the templates of humor, and even surprise us sometimes with some wordplay. But it doesn’t understand the emotional depth, the cultural nuances, or the timing that makes human humor so rich and enjoyable.
The good news is that AI is getting better at abstracting the nuances of humor through more complex interactions with people. Someday, perhaps, we will laugh with, not at, the jokes AI attempts to tell.

Then, be certain that humour, in all its misfits and flaws, is an art form devised by humans only.

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Published via Towards AI