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AI Is Funny - a Generative Joke Model

Posted by timothy on from the funny-is-a-strong-word-for-it dept.

RemyBR writes "Can computers tell a good joke? Is comedy just a matter of statistics or is there something only a human can bring to creating a joke? A joke generator created at the University of Edinburgh (PDF) suggests that AI can be funny. Some AI generated jokes: 'I like my relationships like I like my source, open,' 'I like my coffee like I like my war, cold,' 'I like my boys like I like my sectors, bad.'"

32 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Manually Generated by Dr.+Sheldon+Cooper · · Score: 3, Funny

    I like my slashdot like I like my like like like...

    Loop detected, aborting.

    --
    Bazinga.
    1. Re:Manually Generated by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Funny

      Slashdot would be more like:

      I like my slashdot like I like my cat. Hairy.
      I like my slashdot like I like my cat. Hairy.
      I like my slashdot like I like my cat. Hairy.
      [dup...]

      With the occasional interspersed 3 page rant about something nobody can make sense of

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:Manually Generated by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Funny

      Slashdot would be more like:

      I like my slashdot like I like my cat. Hairy.
      I like my slashdot like I like my cat. Hairy.
      I like my slashdot like I like my cat. Hairy.
      [dup...]

      With the occasional interspersed 3 page rant about HOSTS files

      fixed that for you

    3. Re:Manually Generated by blue+trane · · Score: 2

      I have an In Soviet Russia joke generator:

      > In America, you laugh at jokes.
      In Soviet Russia, jokes laugh at YOU!

      http://subbot.org/isragent/isragent.txt

      It uses the link agent ( http://subbot.org/link/ ) to parse input into Subject, Verb, and Object, then moves the Object to the Subject position and adds YOU! at the end. It also tries to do some verb agreement.

    4. Re:Manually Generated by mbkennel · · Score: 2


      Expert TeXpert choking smokers
      Don't you think the Putin laughs at you?
      See how they smile like pigs in a sty
      See how they spied
      I'm crying

    5. Re:Manually Generated by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 4, Funny

      I like my coffee like I like my slashdot. Filtered.

      --

      Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

  2. Al? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Funny

    Am I the only one who read the headline and thought of Al Gore?

    ob. joke.. I like my coffee like my men - strong and black.

    1. Re:Al? by Dr.+Sheldon+Cooper · · Score: 5, Funny

      Coffee is like a woman.

      Hot and sweet at first, then increasingly cold and bitter.

      --
      Bazinga.
    2. Re:Al? by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Funny

      I like my women like I like my coffee...inanimate.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    3. Re:Al? by jxander · · Score: 5, Funny

      with a spoon in them?

      --
      This signature is false.
    4. Re:Al? by NoImNotNineVolt · · Score: 3, Funny

      I like my women like I like my whiskey -- 12 years old and mixed up with coke.

      --
      Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
    5. Re:Al? by ackthpt · · Score: 2

      Coffee is like a woman.

      Hot and sweet at first, then increasingly cold and bitter.

      Sign: Don't make fun of our Coffee - Some day you'll be old and bitter, too.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    6. Re:Al? by Splab · · Score: 2

      What kind of monster mixes whiskey and coke???

    7. Re: Al? by semi-extrinsic · · Score: 2

      The best sign of bad coffe is that it gets bitter as it gets colder. And I mean that in the non-metaphorical sense.

      --
      for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
    8. Re:Al? by IwantToKeepAnon · · Score: 3, Funny

      Coffee is like a woman.

      Expensive Coffee is like an Expensive Woman .... passed by an Asian Palm Civet ... wait, that didn't quite work.

      --
      "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
    9. Re:Al? by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 2

      You saw they "e" in whiskey didn't you? That means American whiskey, which mostly needs a mixer to make it palatable. Canadian whisky is tolerable, even without mixers. Scotch and Irish whisky are too good to mix and must be drunk neat -- although with ice or even a little water is OK if you want something less strong.

      There are a few distillers making single malts: Balcones in Texas, Stranahan's in Colorado, McCarthy's in Oregon, St. George in California, Leviathan, which I think is also from California, Pine Barrens from New York, Hudson from New York, Triple Smoke from Kentucky and a few more.

  3. Cue the barrage... by pspahn · · Score: 3, Funny

    I like my women like I like my sectors, industrial.

    --
    Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
    1. Re:Cue the barrage... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      It is definitely a generic frat boy joke generator.

      Not sure. It the thing is the I like my women like I like my X...Y are not funny because they say things about women, they're funny because they protray the teller as a gross nerd, creepy, insanely psychopathic, a total sicko, a massive pedo, etc. Listing some of the more popular ones as X|Y

      Whisk[e]y | 12 years old and mixed up with coke
      Whisky | Never less than 10 years old
      Coffee | Ground up and kept in the freezer
      Wine | 60 years old and locked in the cellar
      Hard disks | Fast, wide & SCSI
      Women are like pizza, best enjoyed when still warm.

      The jokes are about the teller, not about women, which is more the opposite of what I'd think of as fratboy jokes.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  4. website! by Xicor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    give us a website with access to this joke maker! not just a journal article

  5. "AI-generated" is an overstatement by Typical+Slashdotter · · Score: 5, Informative

    Reading the article, they have a (human-created) statistical model for the specific words people will find funny in this one, exact type of joke. The only thing the "AI" is doing is analyzing word frequencies against this model. I suggest calling these "statistically-generated" jokes, or similar.

    1. Re:"AI-generated" is an overstatement by Hatta · · Score: 2

      Exactly. Let us know when the AI generates the formula, instead of just plugging words into it.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  6. This Has Been Done by Toad-san · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, in the movies anyway. Remember the first robot who could NOT get a joke? (Robbie)
    And I think the first wise-cracking robot? (Johnny 5 in "Short Circuit")

    And then of course there was Data .. with mixed results in reference to humor and jokes.

    1. Re:This Has Been Done by bryny · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What about the computer in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" which was trying to understand humor. One attempt was:

      Why is a fish like a laser beam?
      Neither on of them can whistle.

      It was better at practical jokes, like adding some zeroes on the end of a janitor's paycheck.

  7. Women by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Funny

    I like my women like I like my AI joke generator. Inaccessible to most of the interested geeks.

  8. Re:Ok, now let me try... by N0Man74 · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...I like my computer generated joke examples like I like my MSDN how-to articles...terrible?

    I like my computer generated jokes like I like my computer joke generator errors...

    .cpp(31) : error C2337: 'funny_error' : attribute not found

  9. That's what she said by barlevg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The fascinating thing to me was that the funniest jokes it managed to come up with had a definite misogynistic streak. Is it because misogyny is inherently amusing, or because sexist jokes are low-hanging fruit? Link to more coverage of the same story.

  10. Really like to see someone implement this by barlevg · · Score: 2

    So from what I can read, this particular joke generator uses pretty straightforward word association and some Bayesian weighting. This article describes model that's a bit more complicated (having to do with graphs of word associations and forming loops of optimal length), and I wonder if it'd produce better (that is, funnier) results.

  11. Re:New Roe by ackthpt · · Score: 2

    I like my AI like I like my zombies, mancery.

    I like my AI like I like my - INSERT DISK 2 TO CONTINUE

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  12. The Essence of Humor by tinkerton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Usually people mix up humor and powerful humor. So they think of all the ingredients that make it work. The best example of humor is then the one that makes you laugh more.
    But here's another angle: Just think of humor as having a humor part and a booster that makes you laugh more. The humor part is just the perception switch. It can be pretty mild. But add the naughtiness, the meanness , the embarassment and they provide a boost to the humor.

    Taken that way, the AI examples in the topic article are really touching the essence of humor.

  13. Context is important by istartedi · · Score: 2

    You need Dr. Strangelove to walk into a coffee shop, and for the barista to ask him how he likes his coffee. Then MAYBE it's funny. Furthermore, the deliver and timing matters. You can deliver that line and kill or die. Finally, the person who sees this might not get it, or they might get it and just not think it's funny. Yeah, yeah, Dr. Strangelove likes the cold war. Not funny... to that guy; but maybe funny to you.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  14. Humor is an exploit of laughter as social bonding by __roo · · Score: 2

    In Mind Wide Open Steven Johnson points out that "Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It's an instinctive form of social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit."

    Think about how often you laugh at references, the more obscure the better. You're sharing a bond with the person making that reference—and once you start looking for that, it becomes increasingly obvious (at least it did for me).

    That's probably why "I like my X like my Y, Z" style jokes are funny—they make us think, "Wow, you and I both see that X and Y have that relationship, possibly based on abusing a synonym, which doesn't immediately spring to mind when you think of them."

    The more I think about humor as an exploit of laughter as social bonding behavior, the more I notice it. And the more I notice people laughing when things aren't funny, but when it's appropriate to reconfirm a social bond (like when someone does something embarrassing that might take them out of the social norm, and the people around them laugh to reassure them that the social bond has not been damaged... much).

    This is where I would make a joke about how geeks are not good at social bonding, but I'm too much of a geek to relate to such things.

    --
    Building Better Software
  15. Schubert's 8th by Alsee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I like my jokes like I like my symphonies

    -

    --
    - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.