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If/when generative AI gets good at jokes, it's going to cause a big change in how people react to humorous utterances. If gmail can nudge you to insert jokes at

If/when generative AI gets good at jokes, it's going to cause a big change in how people react to humorous utterances. If gmail can nudge you to insert jokes at the drop of a hat, anyone can be funny on email. If a Google Glass-like device (or even just AirPods Pro+) can listen to your conversation and prompt you with a joke to make, then anyone can be funny IRL. It will cheapen humor, or at least the kind of humor that generative AI can make. It will be interesting to see if there remains a certain type of humor that people have a monopoly on. It will also be interesting to see if people end up being 'trained' on how to be funny, through the act of being prompted to be funny by AI. It's going to be a weird world, where only some of us will remember the time when you could trust that people's jokes/statements/questions originated in their own brains.

jkrubin 3y ago
I don’t think that will happen. You can fake almost anything, but you can’t fake funny.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I'm one of those people who is mostly not-funny, but is occasionally quite funny. I think that if I were given timely material, I could execute it well. I think this would work best with one-liners, where there's less of a need to get the timing right between sentences. For example, if you'd been having a conversation about Topic A, then later Topic B, and there was a joke involving a double meaning of a word that relates to both A and B. Wrap that up in a one-liner, put it on a Google Glass, and a decent number of people could deliver it well enough to get a laugh.
  - bergenbergen 3y ago
    One of the things that surprises me about our hopes for AI is the belief that it will somehow imbue us with creative powers that we don’t have. The idea that GPT is going to make you funny is a bit like thinking you could be John Lennon if GPT would teach you how to play guitar. GPT might help you pass off some bit of wit in an email, but any art it creates (comedy is art) is going to be circumscribed by its inability to be truly creative rather than merely copy/regurgitate existing material. And the reason art is hard is because people are extremely perceptive about what is actually creative/funny/surprising. You can’t fake it.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      I dunno, it seems like it would be good at finding linkages between different topics and then coming up with a word or concept that relates to both. This is at the heart of much humor. Will it have a good hit rate? Surely not at first, but of course it will get better over time. And just like with graphic arts, much of the value is that it can create lots of options, and you can choose to just use the ones you like best. It's like a wacky brainstormer that is sometimes right-on (or inspires you to create something that you never would have thought of).
- raincole 3y ago
  In real life it's hard to tell. On the internet of course you can fake funny. Evidence: top comments on reddit.
- deelowe 3y ago
  That sounds a bit silly. Why can't funny be "faked?" Plenty of successful comedians practiced and had to learn to be funny. So there's clearly a method to it.
  - shkurski_ 3y ago
    Sense of humour (intelligence) is about the ability to find improbable, but insightful things. I believe spitting out patterns extracted from training data is not capable of producing anything close to that.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      by your definition, aren't you just asking it to find the patterns that're uncommon then? given the amount of ram it has access to, that should be at least theoretically possible to generate uncommon patterns and produce something approximating humor.
- p10_user 3y ago
  But you can "add humor" to your communication with light joking - often with a self-depreciative take "I'll get back to you assuming I remember where my head is tonight!"
foolfoolz 3y ago
yea it will be so weird. i can’t imagine living in a world where people’s jokes aren’t original. like a world where most of the jokes are just quoting a tv show or movie… that’s what she said
throwaway743 3y ago
Half of comedy (and nearly anything else) is timing. Having a model prompt in realtime will still result in awkwardly timed/delivery of jokes
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Yeah, I could imagine a prompting system that had you reading off a teleprompter, basically. You wouldn't even know how the joke ends until you got to the end of it. If you had faith in the AI, you could just say whatever it printed, knowing that you'd get a laugh at the end. Dangerous!
- fragmede 3y ago
  Groq seems like it should be possible if you're a fast reader.
crazygringo 3y ago
Anyone can insert "jokes" into an email, and they will fall completely flat. The human thing is to judge the other person, yourself, your relationship, the context of the email, and what you want to achieve with it. Are you trying to disarm? Flirt? Entertain? Validate? Suck up? Impress? Make someone groan? And if it backfires, ouch. The hard part now isn't the joke part. It's the right type of joke in the right place at the right time. And AI doesn't know enough about each of your relationships or what exactly you're trying to achieve with each interaction...
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I don't think AI will ever be able to nail jokes all the time. But I could easily see it being able to go over an email and suggest a couple jokes here or there, which you could accept/reject/edit. It would be interesting if you interacted with someone for years over email, and then finally met in person and found out they were not funny at all. Put that in a dating app and it's along the lines of using filters on your photos. There's more than one way to be a disappointment in person.

jkrubin 3y ago

I don’t think that will happen. You can fake almost anything, but you can’t fake funny.

gnicholas 3y ago
I'm one of those people who is mostly not-funny, but is occasionally quite funny. I think that if I were given timely material, I could execute it well. I think this would work best with one-liners, where there's less of a need to get the timing right between sentences. For example, if you'd been having a conversation about Topic A, then later Topic B, and there was a joke involving a double meaning of a word that relates to both A and B. Wrap that up in a one-liner, put it on a Google Glass, and a decent number of people could deliver it well enough to get a laugh.
- bergenbergen 3y ago
  One of the things that surprises me about our hopes for AI is the belief that it will somehow imbue us with creative powers that we don’t have. The idea that GPT is going to make you funny is a bit like thinking you could be John Lennon if GPT would teach you how to play guitar. GPT might help you pass off some bit of wit in an email, but any art it creates (comedy is art) is going to be circumscribed by its inability to be truly creative rather than merely copy/regurgitate existing material. And the reason art is hard is because people are extremely perceptive about what is actually creative/funny/surprising. You can’t fake it.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I dunno, it seems like it would be good at finding linkages between different topics and then coming up with a word or concept that relates to both. This is at the heart of much humor. Will it have a good hit rate? Surely not at first, but of course it will get better over time. And just like with graphic arts, much of the value is that it can create lots of options, and you can choose to just use the ones you like best. It's like a wacky brainstormer that is sometimes right-on (or inspires you to create something that you never would have thought of).
raincole 3y ago
In real life it's hard to tell. On the internet of course you can fake funny. Evidence: top comments on reddit.
deelowe 3y ago
That sounds a bit silly. Why can't funny be "faked?" Plenty of successful comedians practiced and had to learn to be funny. So there's clearly a method to it.
- shkurski_ 3y ago
  Sense of humour (intelligence) is about the ability to find improbable, but insightful things. I believe spitting out patterns extracted from training data is not capable of producing anything close to that.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    by your definition, aren't you just asking it to find the patterns that're uncommon then? given the amount of ram it has access to, that should be at least theoretically possible to generate uncommon patterns and produce something approximating humor.
p10_user 3y ago
But you can "add humor" to your communication with light joking - often with a self-depreciative take "I'll get back to you assuming I remember where my head is tonight!"

foolfoolz 3y ago

yea it will be so weird. i can’t imagine living in a world where people’s jokes aren’t original. like a world where most of the jokes are just quoting a tv show or movie… that’s what she said

throwaway743 3y ago

Half of comedy (and nearly anything else) is timing. Having a model prompt in realtime will still result in awkwardly timed/delivery of jokes

gnicholas 3y ago
Yeah, I could imagine a prompting system that had you reading off a teleprompter, basically. You wouldn't even know how the joke ends until you got to the end of it. If you had faith in the AI, you could just say whatever it printed, knowing that you'd get a laugh at the end. Dangerous!
fragmede 3y ago
Groq seems like it should be possible if you're a fast reader.

crazygringo 3y ago

Anyone can insert "jokes" into an email, and they will fall completely flat. The human thing is to judge the other person, yourself, your relationship, the context of the email, and what you want to achieve with it. Are you trying to disarm? Flirt? Entertain? Validate? Suck up? Impress? Make someone groan? And if it backfires, ouch. The hard part now isn't the joke part. It's the right type of joke in the right place at the right time. And AI doesn't know enough about each of your relationships or what exactly you're trying to achieve with each interaction...

gnicholas 3y ago
I don't think AI will ever be able to nail jokes all the time. But I could easily see it being able to go over an email and suggest a couple jokes here or there, which you could accept/reject/edit. It would be interesting if you interacted with someone for years over email, and then finally met in person and found out they were not funny at all. Put that in a dating app and it's along the lines of using filters on your photos. There's more than one way to be a disappointment in person.