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I've played around with this quite a bit and ended up dejected. You have have to regenerate and cherry-pick pretty hard to get anything resembling an interestin

I've played around with this quite a bit and ended up dejected. You have have to regenerate and cherry-pick pretty hard to get anything resembling an interesting, believable, or funny result. But I am genuinely excited and optimistic that maybe 5-10 years down the line when we can make our own comedy, like a text-only MVP of the Holodeck. Exciting times.

throwawaynay 5y ago
By have any chance have you tried to use a classifier? Like train a classifier(with good jokes and bad jokes) on r/jokes according to the scores, to filter/sort automatically what GPT generates?
- bestcoder69 5y ago
  No, but that does sound promising. I think some of the issues with trying to get davinci-instruct-v3 by itself to generate comedy outputs are: 1. It _really_ _really_ wants to repeat itself and your own prompt, which is antithetical to comedy. The temperature, presence penalty, and frequency penalty parameters _kinda_ help, but when you increase those too much, things start to break in other ways, like you hit an <|endoftext|> before you hit the punchline you were looking for, because the model is trying so hard to avoid repetition. 2. Being just a predictive language model, it doesn't really _know_ you want comedy, nor can you purposefully instruct it to be funny (even in the instruct models). The AI is going to bias towards playing it completely straight. 3. Since it was trained on the entire internet, there's a good chance if you get a funny output, it just "plagiarized" someone else's joke, which can be awfully disappointing when you Google your output to see if that was the case. 4. Sadly, despite the name, OpenAI is very restrictive in their use cases, and they're heavily indexed towards appealing to commercial customers. The playground is still overly sensitive about what it considers "inappropriate" outputs, and their list of disallowed use cases seems longer than the rest of their documentation. It's hard for me to imagine them allowing too many funny use cases of their API, given what I've read on there.
  - long 5y ago
    Hi, I work on the instruct models. Are you able to share details about the particular task you're doing and the prompts you've tried? (email: <my HN username>@openai.com )
- lariati 5y ago
  Comedy and what people find funny though has such huge variance. There are many professional comedians that I don't find funny at all but enough people do that they can make a career out of it. To me, it would be like trying to classify music with a good or bad label. It is so subjective to taste.
- reidjs 5y ago
  Garbage in/Garbage out if you load it with material from r/jokes. From what I can tell, there’s not a great corpus of funny text (e.g., Carlin, Murphy, Pryor etc). And to capture their nuance you’d probably need more than just transcripts of their standup.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Veedrac 5y ago
As if human jokes aren't cherry-picked? AI's ability to generate endless off-beat variety is particularly valuable for generating humor, just not (yet) with zero effort. It's a subject of taste but a cherry-picked GPT-3 twitter bot is one of my regular sources of laughter.
didericis 5y ago
More like terrifying. The possibilities made available for bad actors to manipulate the masses with this technology is unprecedented and terrible. I think there needs to be a return to a more siloed, community based, web-of-trust model of communication where there is confidence that the people being interacted with are actually human. A persuasive, funny, distributed army of commenters that sound like real people that are given prompts by people with the resources to spin up accounts undetected (or allowed via backdoor deals) and mimic the general public is nightmare material. I think a fair bit of that kind of manipulation is already starting to ramp up. This technology is in my opinion on the same scale of danger as nuclear weapons and needs to be treated as such. It’s insanely dangerous. I don’t think it can be regulated out of existence, and that also risks concentrating it in the hands of bad actors. I think attempts to regulate it effectively should still be made. But I think the only practical way out of this is some kind of distributed private set of communication networks where people control their own servers, their own online identities, and only connect to people they meet in real life (and then connect to others through networks of relations). I think that’s more realistically accomplishable then it sounds and is desperately needed.
- anon_123g987 5y ago
  I choose to be optimistic about the upcoming AI bot wars: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/.

throwawaynay 5y ago

By have any chance have you tried to use a classifier? Like train a classifier(with good jokes and bad jokes) on r/jokes according to the scores, to filter/sort automatically what GPT generates?

bestcoder69 5y ago
No, but that does sound promising. I think some of the issues with trying to get davinci-instruct-v3 by itself to generate comedy outputs are: 1. It _really_ _really_ wants to repeat itself and your own prompt, which is antithetical to comedy. The temperature, presence penalty, and frequency penalty parameters _kinda_ help, but when you increase those too much, things start to break in other ways, like you hit an <|endoftext|> before you hit the punchline you were looking for, because the model is trying so hard to avoid repetition. 2. Being just a predictive language model, it doesn't really _know_ you want comedy, nor can you purposefully instruct it to be funny (even in the instruct models). The AI is going to bias towards playing it completely straight. 3. Since it was trained on the entire internet, there's a good chance if you get a funny output, it just "plagiarized" someone else's joke, which can be awfully disappointing when you Google your output to see if that was the case. 4. Sadly, despite the name, OpenAI is very restrictive in their use cases, and they're heavily indexed towards appealing to commercial customers. The playground is still overly sensitive about what it considers "inappropriate" outputs, and their list of disallowed use cases seems longer than the rest of their documentation. It's hard for me to imagine them allowing too many funny use cases of their API, given what I've read on there.
- long 5y ago
  Hi, I work on the instruct models. Are you able to share details about the particular task you're doing and the prompts you've tried? (email: <my HN username>@openai.com )
lariati 5y ago
Comedy and what people find funny though has such huge variance. There are many professional comedians that I don't find funny at all but enough people do that they can make a career out of it. To me, it would be like trying to classify music with a good or bad label. It is so subjective to taste.
reidjs 5y ago
Garbage in/Garbage out if you load it with material from r/jokes. From what I can tell, there’s not a great corpus of funny text (e.g., Carlin, Murphy, Pryor etc). And to capture their nuance you’d probably need more than just transcripts of their standup.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Veedrac 5y ago

As if human jokes aren't cherry-picked? AI's ability to generate endless off-beat variety is particularly valuable for generating humor, just not (yet) with zero effort. It's a subject of taste but a cherry-picked GPT-3 twitter bot is one of my regular sources of laughter.

didericis 5y ago

More like terrifying. The possibilities made available for bad actors to manipulate the masses with this technology is unprecedented and terrible. I think there needs to be a return to a more siloed, community based, web-of-trust model of communication where there is confidence that the people being interacted with are actually human. A persuasive, funny, distributed army of commenters that sound like real people that are given prompts by people with the resources to spin up accounts undetected (or allowed via backdoor deals) and mimic the general public is nightmare material. I think a fair bit of that kind of manipulation is already starting to ramp up. This technology is in my opinion on the same scale of danger as nuclear weapons and needs to be treated as such. It’s insanely dangerous. I don’t think it can be regulated out of existence, and that also risks concentrating it in the hands of bad actors. I think attempts to regulate it effectively should still be made. But I think the only practical way out of this is some kind of distributed private set of communication networks where people control their own servers, their own online identities, and only connect to people they meet in real life (and then connect to others through networks of relations). I think that’s more realistically accomplishable then it sounds and is desperately needed.

anon_123g987 5y ago
I choose to be optimistic about the upcoming AI bot wars: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/.