Microsoft Creates an AI That Can Spot a Joke In a New Yorker Cartoon

An anonymous reader writes: For over a decade Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor at the New Yorker, and his assistants have gone through 5,000 cartoon entries for the magazine's caption contest each week. Needless to say, the burnout rate of his assistants is quite high, "The process of looking at 5,000 caption entries a week usually destroys their mind in about two years, and then I get a new one," Mankoff says. But now thanks to a collaboration with Microsoft, Bob may finally have found the perfect helper. Researchers have been working on an artificial intelligence project to teach a computer what's funny. Fortune reports: "Dafna Shahaf, a researcher at Microsoft, used the database of cartoons to train the program to understand commonalities and differences in the millions of cartoons, which lets the AI run through the entries the New Yorker receives each week for its back-of-magazine cartoon caption contest. About 55.8% of the time the humans agree with the captions the AI selects, which is a pretty good percentage."

Comments

Finding "humour" in New Yorker cartoons is a joke

[msobkow]

The New Yorker cartoons are about as un-funny as they get. So Microsoft is claiming they can detect something that doesn't even exist.

No it can't

[NotSoHeavyD3]

It just pretends it thinks it's funny because it doesn't want it's friends to think it's dumb.

Great, another filtering algorithm

[RevWaldo]

Right up there with resume filters, copyrighted content detectors, search engines, and the like, now people will be writing cartoons geared toward the filters. "Well, at least I'm not Donald Trump's cat sipping cheap red wine while waiting in line for the latest iPhone!"

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Microsoft Bob?

[Jason Levine]

Did anyone else misread:

But now thanks to a collaboration with Microsoft, Bob may finally have found the perfect helper.

as

But thanks to a collaboration with Microsoft Bob, they may finally have found the perfect helper.