You must be kidding!
Would you fund a research project designed to develop artificial intelligence’s sense of humor? Quite possibly not. You may legitimately doubt that it is in the public interest to develop AI that can tell jokes. But this capability would help the technology be more effective and on-target.
Although artificial intelligence researchers take the subject of humor seriously, there is no end of difficulty: robots just don’t know how to tell jokes. And the ones they do try to create turn out to be offensive and discriminatory – in the process laying bare our biases and stereotypes. Robots don’t get puns, and don’t recognize irony or humor based on differences in pronunciation.
So, why is a sense of humor important?
- A lack of humor stymies the usefulness of language analysis tools: the chatbot that gives you information about train times doesn’t grasp your irony, and the app that analyzes customer comments about your products doesn’t pick up on sarcasm.
- It also restricts your interactions with robots: the population is aging, becoming more isolated, and countries such as Japan are deploying robots designed to beat feelings of loneliness. But, without a sense of humor, they partly fail in their mission to amuse and entertain.
So, if you’re afraid that automation is going to make your job disappear, retrain as a comedian!
To go further
“When will humorous AIs press our buttons with their jokes ?”
by Tony Veale (Psyche, April 25, 2022).
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