Why Artificial Intelligence Can't Take a Joke
Two neural networks walk into a bar….
Artificial
intelligence is capable of some very sophisticated kinds of thinking.
IBM’s Watson, for instance, can not only compete in game shows, it can
perform high-level medical analysis and even create gourmet recipes. Artificial neural networks – the brain-like core of cutting-edge A.I. systems – are making great strides in real-time translation and image recognition.
But one thing artificial intelligence can’t do is tell a joke.
In
fact, despite decades of research, computers are nowhere close to being
able to generate, or even recognize, humor. It’s pretty astonishing,
really. Researchers haven’t just had limited success with teaching
computers to be funny – they’ve had virtually no success at all.
That hasn’t stopped them from trying. A recent report over at MIT Technology Review
details the latest attempt to introduce artificial intelligence to the
elements of comedy. It appears that researchers at Virginia Tech have
developed a complex A.I. system designed to discern between humorous
clip-art cartoons and regular illustrations. In short, they’re trying to
get A.I. to recognize funny pictures.
Inscrutable New Yorker
cartoons aside, that’s something we humans can usually manage before
pre-school even kicks in. But computers have a hell of a time wrapping
their digital brains around the idea of humor.
Details on the Virginia Tech experiment
are fascinating. To train the system to recognize humor, the team
amassed a database of 6,400 images, half of which were intended to be
humorous, half not. The A.I. system was then encouraged to create a
database of the thing it’s trying to learn – in this case, what’s
“funny.”
The
study required the creation of a tortuous system of mathematical
algorithms, crowdsourcing, image recognition and complex machine
learning. All to determine whether a simple clip-art image is funny. A
typical quote from the study: “We observe that the model learns that, in
general, animate objects like humans and animals are more likely
sources of humor compared to inanimate objects.”
Hoo, boy.
Clearly,
computers are a long way from bringing the funny. It’s actually a big
problem in the field of artificial intelligence, and it has its own
designation as a branch of study: computational humor. If we’re hoping
to create social machines that truly communicate like people – digital
assistants like Siri, or the emerging breed of companion robots –
they’ll need to be able to take a joke, or at least recognize one.
But it’s a tough nut to crack.
Just think: Psychologists have struggled for decades
to figure out how humor works – and that’s without the computation
complications. Humor is not only famously subjective, it’s almost always
dependent on several layers of context. Cultural context is just one
obstacle: What’s funny in America isn’t necessarily funny in Japan. For
that matter, what’s funny in Texas isn’t necessarily funny in New York
City.
Parsing
the even more subtle layers of situational context requires a whole
different kind of number-crunching. Then there’s the pesky matter of
language itself, which is riddled with ambiguities and high-level
cognitive maneuvers like irony or allegory.
Linguists
and computer scientists have come at the problem from different angles
over the years. Back in 2012, an entire national symposium
was dedicated to computational humor, with presentation titles like
“Detecting and Generating Ironic Comparisons: An Application of Creative
Information Retrieval.” The University of Aberdeen in Scotland has
sponsored several involved research projects on the issue over the
years, including a truly frightening pun-generating robot.
Perhaps
the single most successful computational humor project of recent years
was a software system that knew when to drop “that’s what she said” into
conversations. No joke.
It’s a rather underwhelming track record. In fact, a persuasive case can be made that humor is the ultimate Turing test
for artificial intelligence. Computers can do a whole lot of things a
whole lot better than humans can. But they sure aren’t funny.
It’s kind of comforting, somehow. When A.I. can come up with a good Hannibal Burress joke, or write a decent 30 Rock script, that’s when we’ll know our species is in danger of being supplanted. Until then, why worry?
Courtesy: Yahoo!
