What happens when the machine tries its hand at stand-up comedy? It crashes. That’s what a new study concluded after it studied AI’s ability to understand puns. Experts from Cardiff University, in south Wales, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice tested Large Language Models with puns like: “I used to be a comedian, but my life became a joke,” and found that even when AI was able to discern the structure of the joke, it didn’t grasp the humour in it.
Jokes aside, AI has the ability to do a lot that humans can — and do it well. Since the AI boom in late 2022, there has been panic across industries over the possibility of technology overtaking humans. In creative pursuits, too, AI has been catching up. It has won art competitions, generated feature-length films and carried on lengthy flirtations on dating apps. The 2023 Writers Guild strike in Hollywood explicitly demanded safeguards against the use of AI. In Germany, a court recently ruled that OpenAI violated the country’s copyright laws by using artists’ songs without permission to train its LLMs. Anthropic had to write a cheque for $1.5 billion to authors whose work it pirated to train Claude, its AI model. These instances show that anxieties about human skills being undermined by an algorithm’s intelligent imitation are not without foundation. As it turns out, though, to tell the fake from the real, all it takes is a punchline.
That even dad jokes are beyond AI should be reassuring. Anyone who has chuckled over a friend’s witticism or bonded with someone over everyday tragicomedies can attest to the fact that humour adds texture and flavour to life. For all AI is cracked up to be, cracking up is still strictly human business.
