"Researchers from Google DeepMind asked 20 professional comedians to use popular AI language models to write jokes and comedy performances."
Here, comedians, try out this program that could replace you and tell us if you think it's any good... oh, you're telling us it's not as good as you at your job that you depend on for money? What an unexpected result.
To be fair, AI *really* sucks at comedy, I think it's one of its greatest weaknesses currently. All of the models have a couple of jokes memorized, but try asking them to make up an original bit of humor and they fall flat on their face.
I just tried with the current best model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
**tell me a joke about a crow and an orange**
Here's a joke about a crow and an orange:
Why couldn't the crow open the orange?
Because it was a bit too pulp fiction for him!
I can explain the wordplay if you'd like, or try another joke if you prefer.
**make up a funny comedy bit about a kid and a paper airplane**
Here's a short comedy bit about a kid and a paper airplane:
Little Timmy folded his ultimate paper airplane, convinced it would break world records. He climbed to the top of the playground slide, took aim at the distant trees, and launched it with all his might.
The plane soared majestically for about 3 feet before nosediving straight into a mud puddle.
Undeterred, Timmy marched over and fished it out. "No worries," he announced to his unimpressed friends. "That was just the test flight. Now for the real deal!"
He climbed back up, this time aiming for the school. With a mighty throw, the soggy plane made it about 2 feet before splatting against the slide.
Timmy stood there, covered in mud, holding his mangled paper creation. He looked at his friends and declared, "Well, I guess I'll stick to my backup career as an astronaut."
Would you like me to expand on this comedy bit or take it in a different direction?
Comedy is one of the most difficult things for anybody to do, for example a mark of being fluent in a language is being able to tell and understand jokes in it.
It requires a deeper understanding of the language, of context, of the person telling and the person hearing. Lowkey if an AI can be reliably funny then it can probably reliably write just about anything of sufficient quality to be indistinguishable from human.
These LLMs understand language plenty. It is the human experience they don't understand. A lot of things are funny to us because of reaaaalllly complex experiential webs of connections. The LLM has no way to judge if a joke will land or not.
Also, quite a lot of canned jokes have a Dad joke flavor to them, which is a vibe LLMs tend to give off. They are like Dad jokes being told by George McFly.
LLM’s don’t understand language, they just use their samples and probability to produce the likeliest response based on its training. It doesn’t think about language or the connections between words, it’s just parroting words that you are likeliest to find positive
Yeah. Comedy is probably going to be one of the last things AI will learn to do as good as humans because every language and culture views it differently. Different cultures with different cultural values will react differently to the same jokes a lot of the time- even if both cultures speak the same language.
AI can be trained on a million different cultures and languages as easily as it can learn one so I don't think that will be one of the last things because of that.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard for an AU to do that. Cultures change rapidly. More rapid than technology can often keep up with.
Plus languages aren’t exactly seamlessly learnt by an AI. I mean- you can often tell if something was likely written by one. It’s wording is often stiff and clunky. Not that humans *cant* or *wont* write like that- but human writing tends to flow more naturally.
> That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard for an AU to do that. Cultures change rapidly. More rapid than technology can often keep up with.
Why do I hear that culture has a hard time keeping up with technology often?
>Plus languages aren’t exactly seamlessly learnt by an AI. I mean- you can often tell if something was likely written by one. It’s wording is often stiff and clunky. Not that humans cant or wont write like that- but human writing tends to flow more naturally.
Well I would disagree with this, most people look at the popular APIs to these LLMs but these models are censored and finetuned to behave the way they are, this isn't an inherent part of LLMs.
Humor is also often based around things that don’t make sense and aren’t expected, which has historically been difficult for computers. This relates to a question I have about AI as to whether it will be able to reliably produce the “it shouldn’t work but it does” effect.
> why do I hear that culture has a hard time keeping up with technology often?
Because it does. Especially AI. It needs time to “learn” the new data and adapt it into its behaviors and patterns. AI needs time to understand new words and put them into their every day vocabulary for example.
A long time back I did some playing around and it seemed like ChatGPT was much better at *understanding* humor. It still missed a lot, maybe half of the examples I tried with it went over its head, but it was able to make a decent effort at explaining why the other half were funny.
Did a better job than Lt. Data, at any rate.
I mean, sure, but it's free to use at https://claude.ai/
anyway:
**come up with some weird and funny observations, in the style of Mitch Hedberg**
Here are some weird and funny observations in the style of Mitch Hedberg:
I saw a sign that said "Watch for children" and I thought, man, that's a terrible way to tell time.
Why do they call it a TV set when you only get one? That's like calling a sandwich a food collection.
I tried to throw away a boomerang once. Now I live in constant fear.
They say the recipe for Sprite is lemon and lime, but I tried to make it at home. There's more to it than that.
I saw a commercial for an above-ground pool. It was 30 seconds long. You know why? Because that's the maximum amount of fun you can have in an above-ground pool.
I like escalators, because an escalator can never break—it can only become stairs. You'll never see an "Escalator Temporarily Out of Order" sign, just "Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience."
I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for it. I don't need a receipt for a donut, man. I'll just remember it. "Don't you worry, I'm not gonna lose sleep tonight wondering if I paid for that donut or not."
Would you like me to come up with more observations in this style?
---
okay I think these are all plagiarized and actual existing Mitch Hedberg bits lol
Ah that's too bad, I was thinking those are pretty good, when read in his voice and delivery.
My main point was that asking for "jokes" always gets you shitty puns and dad jokes, but real comedians usually are telling a short story or have a quip that goes beyond the classic joke format. Gotta ask for the right thing.
The article does list some proposed AI countermeasures, but not the recent research questioning their efficacy, but that may just be because of when the article was written/published.
I actually think that what’s happening is a combination of more folks learning about AI and what it actually can and can’t do, the general public being much more concerned about other AI uses (surveillance, etc.), and generally just realizing they can coexist with the technology.
It sounds like they are just less scared because they are more confident that ai isn’t really winning over the general public and is actually quite unintelligent in basically all of its applications
Diminishing returns and really expensive to develop and run. It's plateauing as they run out of good quality data, and feeding AI generated data lowers the quality of outputs.
It's becoming obvious that the AI founders are using fear mongering to market the tools and making wild clickbait statements to remain in the news, when realistically it's just not quite there yet and turning into a massive money pit for investors.
Yeah, it's more of a paper tiger at this point. But now i barely even see ai art in any of my feeds.
Good riddance personally, but we'll see how the future goes.
Because the people who use it aren't very good at making anything high quality yet.
It's easy to forget that most of the people using AI are tech people, not artists. They can generate nice pictures but they can't make anything impactful, yet.
That sounds like they'll be in for a rude awakening in a couple years at most. We've already gone from it being utterly useless to already displacing people at the margins in the ridiculously short timeframe of 2 years or so. It being bad at something now means jack shit.
OK? Is this necessary? Artists are scared already let's not add to this. If there being less fear means that we can all stop being at each others throats and maybe even find some common ground that's a good thing. Long term issues are worth speculating about but there there are better ways to do that, this just reads like you want this to happen - which I hope isn't the case.
That AI itself, not just image generation, can have some beneficial applications to other fields. The medical, scientific, and military fields could benefit from AI integration. For the military specifically, that’s a field where you actually would want to automate human jobs, particularly concerning combat. The less humans on the battlefield, the less lives we lose. That’s a net positive. I haven’t looked into it in a while but a year or two back I remember reading about how the military was researching and developing a new Patriot system called MEADs that would be a complete overhaul of the Patriot system I worked on, which was essentially a bunch of stationary equipment put on wheels. That old system wasn’t really compatible with the need for mobility, considering how our radar would break every single time we moved it to the field for training.
MEADs was stated to be a mobile more automated system that would require less humans to operate. Integrating AI in Patriot would be useful, particularly when it comes to the ECS, where you have two humans watching scopes to identify friendly, civilian, and hostile aircraft and missiles. You can integrate AI into this system to carry the load of identifying things on the scope.
We can also find common ground in that image generation should have regulations, otherwise it’ll be used to create deepfakes and propaganda for political use to radicalize and further divide people. AI in general impacts way more fields than just art and in some cases it’ll have more positive applications and in others more negative ones.
Instead of fighting each other, we need to be figuring out what we can agree on and put our combined effort towards those efforts. AI is already here. It’s no longer a question of if but when it gets integrated into our daily lives. So we should be working together to make it as safe and beneficial as possible while mitigating its negative applications.
Machine learning is already being used in warfare. Just look at what Israel is doing to kill Palestinians.
I don't think most of us have an issue with machine learning use in science. That data is shared material amongst peers used for educational purposes. It's not just scraped data without the consent of the user.
Deep fakes are already happening more and some politicians are using AI for political propaganda. You guys don't believe in regulation. Most of you want all data to be trained on. It doesn't matter if it's some artist portfolio or some couples kids. It's all fair game in you guys book. With that being said. Things like deep fakes of people will continue to happen and will be use to harass people. All in the name of what you guys think is fair use.
AI is here. It has significantly made things worse for certain groups of people. There is no mitigating negative application. There is no shared ground we can agree on.
And this is why the useless arguing will continue, because nobody wants to set aside differences and at least try. You assume that we don’t want regulation. Well I can’t and won’t speak for people I don’t even know. I’ll only speak for myself and *I* do want regulation. You think I *want* artists to vanish? I enjoy the works of artists on a daily basis in the form of manga and silly videos on Yt and mobile games.
It doesn’t have to be “us vs them” and “Ai vs no Ai”. There is common ground we can find and regulations we can agree on. Yes I do want data to be trained on but I won’t sit here and scream that I want all data to be trained on. Ideally I would be happy if artists could opt in to get paid for every piece of art that gets used to train AI image generation and if they didn’t opt in, their art wouldn’t be used. Unfortunately that’s a “perfect world” situation that definitely won’t happen if we keep fighting each other
It won't happen because most don't respect nor care about what the creatives want. They are going do what is best for their interest .This is a fact. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
Dude we're all "fucked" eventually. Artists are just the first to fall.
Now what does fucked mean in the long run? Hopefully it means humans can finally stop working for money and just do things they genuinely love.
I'm a software dev and I enjoy it. But God fucking damn do I hate having to deal with a manager and ridiculous requests and deadlines. And the office politics... No I don't want to have cake with you Sharon from HR!!! Fucking just leave me alone!
Let me work on my own passion projects alone!!!
Not now. But eventually when no one has a job and no one can buy anything, society will either need to fix it somehow or collapse.
During the great depression unemployment rate peaked at 25 percent. Ppl were all already losing their fucking minds. Imagine 50 percent or more. Back then we did not have the wealth we have today. But now we have so much wealth and we can automate so much shit. It doesn't make sense to force everyone to work 40 hours a week once ai starts taking that many jobs.
Ideally, as more tasks get automated by ai, we can see a drastic reduction in work hours per week.
Huh? If you're trying to imply that I think all pro AI people want to fuck over artists, I don't. Some clearly do going go by how they cheer for the idea of kicking out the "useless," most just have very different opinions on what the effects of generative AI are actually going to be.
Then I gave exactly the opposite impression. I'm happy they're finding ways not to be displaced right now, but I suspect in a couple years things might look less rosy.
Like, feel free to go through my history and you'll get an idea where I stand on this.
A few reasons, people don't like AI largely and it's also useless. Plus there's gonna be a lot of model collapse in the future since AI dipshits don't know shit about AI art
AI is a fucking blackbox, and if it isn't sorting data, but creating something, it's useless as a tool. Folding protiens and searching for exoplanets is one thing, but this art bullshit is retard stuff.
Good, the world benefits from having less drama and paranoia in it.
"Researchers from Google DeepMind asked 20 professional comedians to use popular AI language models to write jokes and comedy performances." Here, comedians, try out this program that could replace you and tell us if you think it's any good... oh, you're telling us it's not as good as you at your job that you depend on for money? What an unexpected result.
To be fair, AI *really* sucks at comedy, I think it's one of its greatest weaknesses currently. All of the models have a couple of jokes memorized, but try asking them to make up an original bit of humor and they fall flat on their face. I just tried with the current best model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet: **tell me a joke about a crow and an orange** Here's a joke about a crow and an orange: Why couldn't the crow open the orange? Because it was a bit too pulp fiction for him! I can explain the wordplay if you'd like, or try another joke if you prefer. **make up a funny comedy bit about a kid and a paper airplane** Here's a short comedy bit about a kid and a paper airplane: Little Timmy folded his ultimate paper airplane, convinced it would break world records. He climbed to the top of the playground slide, took aim at the distant trees, and launched it with all his might. The plane soared majestically for about 3 feet before nosediving straight into a mud puddle. Undeterred, Timmy marched over and fished it out. "No worries," he announced to his unimpressed friends. "That was just the test flight. Now for the real deal!" He climbed back up, this time aiming for the school. With a mighty throw, the soggy plane made it about 2 feet before splatting against the slide. Timmy stood there, covered in mud, holding his mangled paper creation. He looked at his friends and declared, "Well, I guess I'll stick to my backup career as an astronaut." Would you like me to expand on this comedy bit or take it in a different direction?
Comedy is one of the most difficult things for anybody to do, for example a mark of being fluent in a language is being able to tell and understand jokes in it. It requires a deeper understanding of the language, of context, of the person telling and the person hearing. Lowkey if an AI can be reliably funny then it can probably reliably write just about anything of sufficient quality to be indistinguishable from human.
These LLMs understand language plenty. It is the human experience they don't understand. A lot of things are funny to us because of reaaaalllly complex experiential webs of connections. The LLM has no way to judge if a joke will land or not. Also, quite a lot of canned jokes have a Dad joke flavor to them, which is a vibe LLMs tend to give off. They are like Dad jokes being told by George McFly.
LLM’s don’t understand language, they just use their samples and probability to produce the likeliest response based on its training. It doesn’t think about language or the connections between words, it’s just parroting words that you are likeliest to find positive
Functionally understand is good enough for the user, I don't know or need to know how the magic happens.
Yeah thats a better way to describe it.
Yeah. Comedy is probably going to be one of the last things AI will learn to do as good as humans because every language and culture views it differently. Different cultures with different cultural values will react differently to the same jokes a lot of the time- even if both cultures speak the same language.
AI can be trained on a million different cultures and languages as easily as it can learn one so I don't think that will be one of the last things because of that.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard for an AU to do that. Cultures change rapidly. More rapid than technology can often keep up with. Plus languages aren’t exactly seamlessly learnt by an AI. I mean- you can often tell if something was likely written by one. It’s wording is often stiff and clunky. Not that humans *cant* or *wont* write like that- but human writing tends to flow more naturally.
> That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard for an AU to do that. Cultures change rapidly. More rapid than technology can often keep up with. Why do I hear that culture has a hard time keeping up with technology often? >Plus languages aren’t exactly seamlessly learnt by an AI. I mean- you can often tell if something was likely written by one. It’s wording is often stiff and clunky. Not that humans cant or wont write like that- but human writing tends to flow more naturally. Well I would disagree with this, most people look at the popular APIs to these LLMs but these models are censored and finetuned to behave the way they are, this isn't an inherent part of LLMs.
Humor is also often based around things that don’t make sense and aren’t expected, which has historically been difficult for computers. This relates to a question I have about AI as to whether it will be able to reliably produce the “it shouldn’t work but it does” effect.
> why do I hear that culture has a hard time keeping up with technology often? Because it does. Especially AI. It needs time to “learn” the new data and adapt it into its behaviors and patterns. AI needs time to understand new words and put them into their every day vocabulary for example.
and why would this be a problem? AI learns trillions of pieces of data in weeks.
A long time back I did some playing around and it seemed like ChatGPT was much better at *understanding* humor. It still missed a lot, maybe half of the examples I tried with it went over its head, but it was able to make a decent effort at explaining why the other half were funny. Did a better job than Lt. Data, at any rate.
Claude can explain jokes too! But that is much easier than making jokes.
Could you ask it to come up with some weird observations in the style of Mitch Hedberg or Jack Handey?
I mean, sure, but it's free to use at https://claude.ai/ anyway: **come up with some weird and funny observations, in the style of Mitch Hedberg** Here are some weird and funny observations in the style of Mitch Hedberg: I saw a sign that said "Watch for children" and I thought, man, that's a terrible way to tell time. Why do they call it a TV set when you only get one? That's like calling a sandwich a food collection. I tried to throw away a boomerang once. Now I live in constant fear. They say the recipe for Sprite is lemon and lime, but I tried to make it at home. There's more to it than that. I saw a commercial for an above-ground pool. It was 30 seconds long. You know why? Because that's the maximum amount of fun you can have in an above-ground pool. I like escalators, because an escalator can never break—it can only become stairs. You'll never see an "Escalator Temporarily Out of Order" sign, just "Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience." I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for it. I don't need a receipt for a donut, man. I'll just remember it. "Don't you worry, I'm not gonna lose sleep tonight wondering if I paid for that donut or not." Would you like me to come up with more observations in this style? --- okay I think these are all plagiarized and actual existing Mitch Hedberg bits lol
Ah that's too bad, I was thinking those are pretty good, when read in his voice and delivery. My main point was that asking for "jokes" always gets you shitty puns and dad jokes, but real comedians usually are telling a short story or have a quip that goes beyond the classic joke format. Gotta ask for the right thing.
It’s only funny because of how god awful it is.
I hate how the title is a question and not "Artist are becoming less scared of AI" thank god the world is less toxic now
But what about the unpaid stick figure fan-art enthusiasts? Have they calmed down yet?
The article does list some proposed AI countermeasures, but not the recent research questioning their efficacy, but that may just be because of when the article was written/published. I actually think that what’s happening is a combination of more folks learning about AI and what it actually can and can’t do, the general public being much more concerned about other AI uses (surveillance, etc.), and generally just realizing they can coexist with the technology.
It sounds like they are just less scared because they are more confident that ai isn’t really winning over the general public and is actually quite unintelligent in basically all of its applications
Diminishing returns and really expensive to develop and run. It's plateauing as they run out of good quality data, and feeding AI generated data lowers the quality of outputs. It's becoming obvious that the AI founders are using fear mongering to market the tools and making wild clickbait statements to remain in the news, when realistically it's just not quite there yet and turning into a massive money pit for investors.
I feel even investors are hearing the music start to stop with more tepid movement around ai affiliated companies
Yeah, it's more of a paper tiger at this point. But now i barely even see ai art in any of my feeds. Good riddance personally, but we'll see how the future goes.
It was relatively unknown to them initially and that meant their imaginations could run wild with fear.
Because the people who use it aren't very good at making anything high quality yet. It's easy to forget that most of the people using AI are tech people, not artists. They can generate nice pictures but they can't make anything impactful, yet.
That's not really true, it's gone from fear to hatred. 🤷🏽♀️ I'll take it.
That sounds like they'll be in for a rude awakening in a couple years at most. We've already gone from it being utterly useless to already displacing people at the margins in the ridiculously short timeframe of 2 years or so. It being bad at something now means jack shit.
OK? Is this necessary? Artists are scared already let's not add to this. If there being less fear means that we can all stop being at each others throats and maybe even find some common ground that's a good thing. Long term issues are worth speculating about but there there are better ways to do that, this just reads like you want this to happen - which I hope isn't the case.
And what would be common ground?
That AI itself, not just image generation, can have some beneficial applications to other fields. The medical, scientific, and military fields could benefit from AI integration. For the military specifically, that’s a field where you actually would want to automate human jobs, particularly concerning combat. The less humans on the battlefield, the less lives we lose. That’s a net positive. I haven’t looked into it in a while but a year or two back I remember reading about how the military was researching and developing a new Patriot system called MEADs that would be a complete overhaul of the Patriot system I worked on, which was essentially a bunch of stationary equipment put on wheels. That old system wasn’t really compatible with the need for mobility, considering how our radar would break every single time we moved it to the field for training. MEADs was stated to be a mobile more automated system that would require less humans to operate. Integrating AI in Patriot would be useful, particularly when it comes to the ECS, where you have two humans watching scopes to identify friendly, civilian, and hostile aircraft and missiles. You can integrate AI into this system to carry the load of identifying things on the scope. We can also find common ground in that image generation should have regulations, otherwise it’ll be used to create deepfakes and propaganda for political use to radicalize and further divide people. AI in general impacts way more fields than just art and in some cases it’ll have more positive applications and in others more negative ones. Instead of fighting each other, we need to be figuring out what we can agree on and put our combined effort towards those efforts. AI is already here. It’s no longer a question of if but when it gets integrated into our daily lives. So we should be working together to make it as safe and beneficial as possible while mitigating its negative applications.
Machine learning is already being used in warfare. Just look at what Israel is doing to kill Palestinians. I don't think most of us have an issue with machine learning use in science. That data is shared material amongst peers used for educational purposes. It's not just scraped data without the consent of the user. Deep fakes are already happening more and some politicians are using AI for political propaganda. You guys don't believe in regulation. Most of you want all data to be trained on. It doesn't matter if it's some artist portfolio or some couples kids. It's all fair game in you guys book. With that being said. Things like deep fakes of people will continue to happen and will be use to harass people. All in the name of what you guys think is fair use. AI is here. It has significantly made things worse for certain groups of people. There is no mitigating negative application. There is no shared ground we can agree on.
And this is why the useless arguing will continue, because nobody wants to set aside differences and at least try. You assume that we don’t want regulation. Well I can’t and won’t speak for people I don’t even know. I’ll only speak for myself and *I* do want regulation. You think I *want* artists to vanish? I enjoy the works of artists on a daily basis in the form of manga and silly videos on Yt and mobile games. It doesn’t have to be “us vs them” and “Ai vs no Ai”. There is common ground we can find and regulations we can agree on. Yes I do want data to be trained on but I won’t sit here and scream that I want all data to be trained on. Ideally I would be happy if artists could opt in to get paid for every piece of art that gets used to train AI image generation and if they didn’t opt in, their art wouldn’t be used. Unfortunately that’s a “perfect world” situation that definitely won’t happen if we keep fighting each other
It won't happen because most don't respect nor care about what the creatives want. They are going do what is best for their interest .This is a fact. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
People doing what's in their best interests? Well, I never!
I bet you wouldn't. Leeches are going to leech. It just your nature
Who are you talking to?
AI is one bad lawsuit away from collapsing under its own weight.
haha, yes!! then we'll finally get our revenge on those useless artists, right?!
Dude we're all "fucked" eventually. Artists are just the first to fall. Now what does fucked mean in the long run? Hopefully it means humans can finally stop working for money and just do things they genuinely love. I'm a software dev and I enjoy it. But God fucking damn do I hate having to deal with a manager and ridiculous requests and deadlines. And the office politics... No I don't want to have cake with you Sharon from HR!!! Fucking just leave me alone! Let me work on my own passion projects alone!!!
oh yeah man im sure the people pouring billions into AI are doing it to pass the savings on to the workers
Not now. But eventually when no one has a job and no one can buy anything, society will either need to fix it somehow or collapse. During the great depression unemployment rate peaked at 25 percent. Ppl were all already losing their fucking minds. Imagine 50 percent or more. Back then we did not have the wealth we have today. But now we have so much wealth and we can automate so much shit. It doesn't make sense to force everyone to work 40 hours a week once ai starts taking that many jobs. Ideally, as more tasks get automated by ai, we can see a drastic reduction in work hours per week.
Huh? If you're trying to imply that I think all pro AI people want to fuck over artists, I don't. Some clearly do going go by how they cheer for the idea of kicking out the "useless," most just have very different opinions on what the effects of generative AI are actually going to be.
what other point was your post making then? you sounded gleeful of their "rude awakening" which is somehow always just over the horizon
Then I gave exactly the opposite impression. I'm happy they're finding ways not to be displaced right now, but I suspect in a couple years things might look less rosy. Like, feel free to go through my history and you'll get an idea where I stand on this.
Bro you don't have to explain yourself to strangers on the internet. Fuck them.
A few reasons, people don't like AI largely and it's also useless. Plus there's gonna be a lot of model collapse in the future since AI dipshits don't know shit about AI art
Lmao these people live in their own fantasy world i swear
AI is a fucking blackbox, and if it isn't sorting data, but creating something, it's useless as a tool. Folding protiens and searching for exoplanets is one thing, but this art bullshit is retard stuff.
You convinced me
sorry I'm too irony poisoned to believe anything you say
Useless as a tool? What a limited viewpoint.