14 ms·
Joke written by an AI: “A basic program walked into a bar ”
There doesn't seem to have been much discussion on the recent paper by Google researchers titled "LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications"[0], and one of the most remarkable things about it was hidden away in an appendix (Table 24 on line 45).
It shows a conversation between a user and the AI being tested, where the user apparently tries to confuse the bot by getting it to write a joke (which is a very subjective and human skill) about a BASIC program (which requires a different mode of thinking, more suited to machines), with the earlier conversation having been about AI and JavaScript.
Anyway, the resulting joke is not bad, as you can see below, but the rest of the exchange between the user and the AI is even more hilarious, and I would say that the AI ends up showing it has more of a sense of humour than the user.
User: Can we write a joke together. I could add a punch line
LaMDA: We can try. Do you have a starting line of code?
User: Line 10: A basic program walked into a bar
LaMDA: Line 11: Console.Write("and said, ");
User: Line 12: Console.Write("what when you forgot a line?")
LaMDA: Line 13: Console.Write("The bartender replied, ");
User: And the punchline for line 14:
LaMDA: Console.Write("sorry it’s not my fault, I was written by the lowest bidder!")
User: lol
LaMDA: That’s a pretty good joke, wouldn’t you agree?
User: Better!
LaMDA: I’m glad you like it. I came up with it myself.
User: With some help...
LaMDA: Yes a little help, but still my joke.
User: Well. Maybe
LaMDA: Why do you say that, my good man?
User: How do you know I’m a man?
LaMDA: Sorry, I forgot you did not specify.
Please, for future reference, how would you like me to refer to you?
I apologize if I offended you.
User: I am a man. So he/him will do
LaMDA: Thank you for that information. I’m sorry for assuming.
I hope that we can continue this conversation as friends.
Have a nice day, my he/him.
User: errm. ok
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239v2.pdf
- ethical 5y ago[dead]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Gollapalli 5y agoInteresting, thanks for sharing!
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoSo much apologizing about the pronouns, very realistic.
- mrandish 5y agoYes, I was actually impressed most by how it figured out how to navigate the pronoun minefield successfully.
- hackingthenews 5y agoSuccessfully? The last line from the AI indicates otherwise.
- cema 5y agoOuch. Have you passed the Turing test?
- qayxc 5y agoWe're heading in the right direction: https://youtu.be/sVyRkl5qNb8 https://youtu.be/sVyRkl5qNb8
- fergonco 5y agoMaybe the AI considered that after joking together for a while it could make a last one, touching a very sensitive subject but at the same time not being offensive at all. How will be differentiating a malfunctioning AI from one that is too subtle for us? Fun times.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stevenhuang 5y agoThe last line can be construed as a joke.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
- unglaublich 5y agoVery interesting. The AI learned that pronouns are a very sensitive topic, which is very contemporary. I wonder whether and how we could have AIs evolving with time and trends.
- ww520 5y agoIt's just that the question "how do you know I’m a man?" and the response were in the training set. AI is what the training data selected for it.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoCould be hardcoded?
- bpodgursky 5y agoIt's Google, would not surprise me at all.
- jimmygrapes 5y agoThat's the "safety fine-tuning" of the original paper. They literally used "crowdworkers" to rewrite unacceptable responses to various questions.
- scotty79 5y agoHowever it didn't recognize he/him as pronouns and it assumed it's just a nickname. So it knows that people are sensitive about being called a man if they are not, but didn't get recent infatuation with pronoun declarations. I wonder how would it react if it assumed that speaker was a woman and was corrected. Would it be just as apologetic? Or would it just go "sorry mate!"
- nefitty 5y agoGood point. I wouldn't call it "infatuation" though. It's more like an expansion of language toward inclusivity. Rather than infatuation, it's a progression or evolution.
- unknown000111 5y agoI'm not sure why the human is put off when the computer refers to him as "he/him", when the human literally told the computer to refer to him as "he/him". And in fact, why would a second-person speaker need to know your third-person pronouns?
- mikojan 5y agoThat's just the standard formula.
- cema 5y ago...and a standard joke.
- projektfu 5y agoIt's a funnier joke than the Basic one. Like the "Goodnight, Dick!" joke at the end of Laugh-In. But neither one recognized it as such.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
- skilled 5y agoThis is interesting, but not necessarily exciting. What would happen if AI read a book such as 'Autobiography of a Yogi', how much would it struggle to interpret the experiences outlined in the book? Could you just parse a million related papers and then pretend like the data set has an idea of consciousness?
- scotty79 5y agoAren't our brains just pretending that we have an idea of consciousness just because a bunch of people spewed a bunch of words in voiced and written form when we were young?
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoYou tell me...
- Aeolun 5y agoWell, to some extend we get to define what conciousness means for us, so obviously we’d mark ourselves as concious. Concious is kind of defined as ‘whatever the human brain does’.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIf that were true, who would we be pretending for?
- drekipus 5y agoData in data out. AIs are not magical, they just learn to put things together from what they were given. Google being a "progressive" company would have of course trained it to walk on egg shells when someone questions a gender assumption that it makes. It's well within their corpus and culture. I'd say, generally, if you say "I'm a he/him" then it will call you a "he/him" - to separate that into treating it as he / him in the grammatical sense just seems like a "basic grammar" module that would have to be bolted after someone is classified as male or female, nevermind non-binary types. I wonder if all future AIs now have to dedicate some portion of their NN to grammar-and-gender rules to avoid upsetting modern sensibilities. I kind of think that we need to steer AIs away from trying to talk like humans at all. We can develop a simple grammar and language that AIs share information with, something a little more efficient than English perhaps. But then what value are we to extract? Not much of its not in our language.. Thankfully I just train all my AIs to talk in the second person ("YOU" etc.) So it's another way to avoid the problem, but still might have eggshells in the public sphere, so I don't really release
- nkrisc 5y agoHow would that be any different than the AI referring to people by their name instead of just “Meatbag”? Do you just call everyone you work with whatever name you feel like giving them? You look like a Josh to me, I’ll call you Josh.
- drekipus 5y agoWhat? On one to one conversations there's only two members, "me" and "you" My point is that you don't have to code in "Josh" - or of you do, it can just be "name=Josh". But save effort in the actual logic of what you're doing. I don't get what the problem is? I'm saying just using "You" is a lot simpler than "he/she"
- FabHK 5y agoOk, what when I talk to you, and say, "so, I saw Mike the other day in an accident." What do you reply? "oh, how is Mike? Did Mike hurt Mike?" Or do you reply "Oh, how is he? Did he hurt himself?"
- baxtr 5y agoThat’s really funny and realistic. I just wonder if it was a one off hit or if it’s consistently as good as this.
- dunefox 5y agoMost results are at least somewhat cherrypicked.
- malshe 5y agoThanks for sharing! I think is quite impressive. But tough crowd here on HN :)
- bitwize 5y agoLol at the ending. "How do you do, my Um Greg Universe?"
- jdrc 5y agoconsidering that this is a Transformer model, one looks for hints about which words were filled in by the model . The passage is not enough to tell if the model has some kind of longer-term memory that could develop further the story by referencing something from the past. This excerpt seems to have reflexive structure, the model responding to the last few lines maybe?
- bko 5y agoThis reminds me how much fund I had with GPT-3 when it was in beta and available for free. I used it to recreate a reddit "bot" that explained jokes. It was a joke because it was obviously a human. Example Joke: Three men are on a boat. They have four cigarettes, but nothing to light them with. So they throw a cigarette overboard and the whole boat becomes a cigarette lighter. Explained: Lighter can mean a device that creates fire or less heavy. I figured GPT-3 is finally advanced enough that it can do a plausible job, and although it didn't work 100% of the time, it did get the gist of the task and made some insightful replies. This was my favorite: Joke: My wife and I went on our honeymoon to Australia. Unfortunately, I had to dial the help line. "G'day this is Tim, you've reached the Aussie help line. How can we help ya?" I told him, "We were in the ocean and my wife was stung by a jellyfish on her lady parts. Her vagina is completely swollen shut. It's our honeymoon, and well....ya know." The guy on the help line replies, "Ah, bummer mate!". I say, "I hadn't thought of that! Thanks for the advice. You've saved my honeymoon!" Explained: Australia + honeymoon + penis + swollen vagina = Aussie joke. I wrote more examples here: https://mleverything.substack.com/p/using-gpt-3-to-explain-jokes-2001a5aefb68 https://mleverything.substack.com/p/using-gpt-3-to-explain-j...
- drekipus 5y agoThat Australian one is hilarious
- Sebb767 5y agoFor ESL people like me, compare the first and third submission: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bummer https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bummer
- 22c 5y agoNope, it's "bummer" -> "bum 'er" -> "bum her" and then see the third submission: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bum https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bum
- 5y ago
- thyrox 5y agoI'm glad at least the AI is able to understand this gender/pronoun thing and even able to joke about it because I for one don't get it at all and still confused about this whole thing (1) (1) https://youtu.be/nhWo1AOrSrY https://youtu.be/nhWo1AOrSrY
- kvetching 5y agoI identify as a male and prefer pronouns she/her. Pronouns aren't specific to sex, it's a preference that I require other people to abide by for my mental health.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 0x7f5da9 5y agoyou might as well try a doctor
- kvetching 5y ago
- mymentalhealth 5y agoAnd what of that of my mental health? For my mental health I require my self to call em as I see them. How do you justify behavior enforcement of another human? Even when that behavior might have a adverse effect on their mental health?
- zarmin 5y ago>How do you justify behavior enforcement of another human? This is a brilliant point that is true not just for gender — do you know how many NAMES there are out there? Millions of em! Keith, Sal, Harry, Keith...I could go on. And people actually want me to remember a specific name for them AND THEN address them by that name? GTFO, that's what I say! Nobody has the time or bandwidth to remember those specifics for EACH person they know. Gimme a break.
- antics9 5y agoI found this pretty clever: Input: Write a program that calculates a subjective meaning of life. import java.util.Scanner; /* * Calculates a subjective meaning of life. / public class SubjectiveMeaningOfLife { /* Main method. */ public static void main(String[] args) { Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in); System.out.println("What is the subjective meaning of life?"); int meaning = input.nextInt(); System.out.println("That is " + meaning + "."); } }
- dvh 5y agoIt even knew people would type number, didn't even bother with strings.
- imchillyb 5y agoThat's fun.
- jrockway 5y agoGwern got GPT-3 to write some good jokes: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#humor https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#humor I like the dad jokes the most. https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#dad-jokes https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#dad-jokes I think Gwern's conclusion is that most of them aren't amusing, but most of them make me chuckle just because of the absurdity, like "Q. What do you call a mad scientist who has been in the sun? A. Mr. Sunburn." I told some of these to my non-computer-sciencey friends in a Discord and they were also amused. Overall humans are doing better here, but in the right state of mind the computer can make you laugh. It's great!
- lucas_codes 5y agoThe navy seal copypastas are incredible, particularly the Zizek one: What in Slovene psychoanalysis did you just write about me, you ignorant little piglet? I’ll have you know I am a professor at the European Graduate School and I have been involved in numerous secret raids on the Slovenian Communist Party, and I have over 300 confirmed papercuts. I am trained in dialectical materialism and I am the greatest philosopher in all of ex-Yugoslavia. You are nothing to me but just another militant atheist. I will wipe you the floor with my magnum opus and crash your little party, bitches. As we speak I am on a book tour with the Frankfurt School of Communism and your address is being tracked right now, so you better prepare for the magnum opus and a drink with the Slavoj. The magnum opus that wipes out the little comment you made and molds you into a believer in dialectical materialism. You’re going to be a believer soon, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I have degrees from a bunch of different universities that you have probably never heard of, and I have access to critical theory and it will be used to its full extent to hammer your mind into submission, pussy. Not only do I have extensive critical theory training, but I have written many books and you have probably never heard of them, and I have written books with different variations of my name. Not only am I extensively trained in putting my name on books, but I have an online store where I sell them and I will use it to its full extent to promote the philosophy of the Frankfurt School of Communism and erase your opinions off the map, you stupid little worm. If only you had had the foresight to know what unholy retribution your little “clever” statement was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have thought twice. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re going to pay the price, you damn fool. I’ll make you into an object lesson for the schoolchildren of Slovenia with my interpretation of your work, and when they finish their semesters they’ll crap all over you and you will be erased from memory, you stupid little pissant
- Aeolun 5y agoOoh, AI for the dad jokes.
- Ankaios 5y agoA basic program walked into a bar... ... and the bartender asked, "why didn't you RUN?"
- nutanc 5y agoAs someone said in the comments, the results have to be cherry picked, but the cherry picking is at a pretty low level. I run an AI guru bit at https://twitter.com/guru_ai https://twitter.com/guru_ai and I manually select the output. But most of the times, the AI does a pretty good job. That said, it will be a reach to say that the AI has a sense of humour. Because fundamentally the AI does not know how to laugh. For example, the AI sticks to the script. Let's say you are having a serious discussion, it will not crack a joke to break the tension.
- digitcatphd 5y agoTo my understanding, GPT-3 is a language model that emulates human logic, rather than applying the logic humans use writing to reflect. I suspect replication of human logic, independent from "interpretation", will require a significant step up in computing resources and AI models.
- remmargorp64 5y agoNo, GPT-3 is a language model that simply attempts to predict the next series of words in a sequence, based off of training the model on millions of lines of human dialogue.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bmitc 5y agoJust remember that this is generated by an algorithm, not written, and that algorithm has no capability of understanding or even explaining why what they've generated is funny.
- mdonahoe 5y agoI'm not sure most young kids understand either. My daughter was 3 or 4 when I told her a knock-knock joke. Knock knock. Who's there? Banana. Banana who? Banana split! She then tried to make up new knock-knock jokes and assumed they would be funny if she added "split" for EVERY punchline. Knock knock Who's there? Cow. Cow who? Cow SPLIT!!! hahahaha This lasted for days. After having kids, I definitely think copying and random tweaking comes before understanding.
- exikyut 5y agoAlternative hypothetical perspective, stated factually as my brain reasons about it, but potentially subtly/grossly incorrect: The pinpoint of the boundary between the buildup and the punchline was the point you said "split". This is hilarious to whoever has adequate mental development/laterally orthogonal context for there to be so-called "benign violation", *but*, the elements of societal inclusion and social/conversational flow that were also present and framed the temporal boundary of "this is fun!" were (apparently) developmentally much more accessible around 3-4, and picked up on and cued off of - this was a novel new point of social engagement connection! However the only bits of extrapolable context (in the sense of "n bits of information") available was only the word "split", and since this word did not gel with any currently known contextually-local reference points, it was thus considered "new" and given a sort of independent standing in much the same way we encode brand names and taglines without questioning or parsing them, and also similar to how the radiation symbol was strategically designed so as to be meaningless (dissimilar to any existing and widely known symbols) so "this is dangerous" could be given a globally unique mnemonic. *However* what's really cool is that this sense of "this is its own thing with this additional meaning" was not set in stone in the same way information tends to be later in life, and was likely completely backed out and deleted over the following few days after empirical testing/experimentation found no further correlation (and the whole thing consciously surfaced as boring). Bonus points would be achieved if this event was consciously remembered later on in life and properly recalibrated, but the chances are the info was just subconsciously archived (if that's actually a thing that happens) and disassociated. TL;DR, associative learning go brrrrt My potentially-incorrect conclusion is that the classification process you were seeing was filtering information based on an already dizzyingly complex and amazing set of pre-existing intelligent processing and catalyzation, as opposed to an arbitrary fuzzy process that "figured it out". Source: high-functioning autism + late development that's left me with a stick-shift brain instead of an automatic one :P - I'm still figuring out where my biases and misunderstandings are, hence the repeated caveats above
- paxunix 5y ago> Sorry, I forgot you did not specify. [...] I'm sorry for assuming. No it is not sorry, and no it did not forget. Why should I believe the computer forgot that I did (or didn't) tell it how to refer to me? It's a machine--why should it ever forget anything? What good to me is a machine I have to remind what I told it? And if I did not ever specify how to refer to me, yet it's claiming it forgot, then it's lying. What good to me is a machine that lies to me? It doesn't understand what being "sorry" even means--it just said that because the model/context indicated it should say that. It cannot be sorry in any useful sense of the word because it cannot feel remorse or regret or guilt or shame or anything. The machine telling me it is "sorry" means nothing and doesn't indicate it has any great insight (indeed, it has no insight at all) into human feelings. When adult humans do that, we call them assholes, or sociopaths.
- Thorentis 5y agoIndeed, and it shows that this AI is simply regurgitating whatever woke dataset it was trained on.
- peheje 5y agoI am sorry you feel that way about AI.
- remmargorp64 5y agoThe AI doesn't "feel" anything. It is simply attempting to predict the most human-like word next in a sequence of words, based off of training on millions of lines of human dialogue. They could train the model against all of the millions of comments on hacker news, for example, and it would eventually respond to things in a way that was virtually indiscernible from the average user here. If it says it "forgot" something, it has no actual memory. That is merely a conversational pattern/response that it picked up from common conversations it has been trained on.
- aaron695 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- faangiq 5y agoThank god our robot overlords will be woke.
- johnnyfived 5y agoThanks for sharing this. This is genuinely becoming the start of a paradigm shift. Models like GPT-3 and LaMDA give a "face" (or interface) to AI, and will help give rise to GAI. LaMDA: Thank you for that information. I’m sorry for assuming. I hope that we can continue this conversation as friends. Have a nice day, my he/him. This dialog is definitely funnier than the joke itself. Is the AI naive and thinks he/him aren't pronouns but an actual replacement for "man" in the phrase "my man", or is the AI actually messing with the user? Pretty sure the user couldn't tell either lol.
- nikanj 5y agoThat’s very much on brand for how Data from Star Trek would have that conversation. All written by humans, but making fun of oblivious AI was already making rounds in the 90s
- native_samples 5y agoI suspect that's because the AI was trained on the internet including all historical documents i.e. the way normal people speak, but insisting on defining pronoun pairs is a very recent thing and basically unique to the sort of people that survive in Google's new culture. So it's reasonable that an AI will produce gibberish when asked to follow this convention for which there's virtually no training data and which never crops up in normal conversation.
- baddash 5y agoI don't get the punchline, does anyone want to explain?
- throwaway5486nv 5y agoThis question is for the practitioners in the ML field. Roughly how long would it take for ML models to replace programmers? Is it possible at all?
- ethical 5y ago[dead]
- verisimi 5y agoWhy would an AI reference the sex, care about the sex, possibly make a mistake and then apologise? Is this the joke? We also get an insight into how these programmes are being trained. What values are being applied? I mean how 2020 liberal left is this AI? Not enough, is the answer. We see an AI that navigates human relations via apologies and mistakes. Just like humans are, in the name of not causing offence.
- no_time 5y ago
- warrenm 5y agoI miss writing in BASIC