TED Talks Daily - Can AI master the art of humor? | Bob Mankoff

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Can artificial intelligence be funny, or is comedy a uniquely human trait? In this witty and insightful talk, cartoonist Bob Mankoff explores the art of humor, the evolution of AI and what happens whe...n the two collide. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Timothy Chalamet transforms into the enigmatic Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, a cinematic captivation that explores the tumultuous life of a musical icon. This mesmerizing film captures the essence of Dylan's rebellious spirit and his relentless pursuit of artistic innovation. From the director of acclaimed films Walk the Line and Logan, this extraordinary cinematic experience is a testament to the power of music and the enduring legacy of a true visionary. Watch the trailer now and secure your tickets for a truly unforgettable cinematic experience. A complete unknown.
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Starting point is 00:01:52 There's a lot that AI is capable of these days, but can it match human creativity when it comes to humor? Former New Yorker cartoons editor Bob Mankoff put the machines to the test when it comes to cartooning and quips. In his 2024 talk, he shares what he learned from trying to get AI to make jokes. Whether you're thrilled by what AI can do for us or terrified by what AI is going to do to us, whether it can be funny is probably not top of mind for you. It is for me. I don't care if it turns all of us into paper clips as long as they're funny paper clips. And the fact that it makes
Starting point is 00:02:40 stuff up, hallucinates, for me that's not a bug, that's a feature. My entire career was making stuff up. They're called cartoons. There is no algorithm for humor, but now with the rapid pace of AI, I have to wonder, could there be a bot man cough? You might think my reflexive answer to this would be, how about never?
Starting point is 00:03:11 But while I don't want to be replaced by a bot, I'm not above being helped by it. Steve Jobs famously said that computers are a bicycle for the mind. If that's the case, what's AI? A rocket ship? And at the case, what's AI? A rocket ship, and at my age, you know what? I'd settle for a walker.
Starting point is 00:03:30 The fears of machines replacing humans are not new. When the goals of machines and humans go horribly awry, at least for one of the parties, cartoons don't happen in a cultural vacuum. They're part of the zeitgeist. The guy who invented cybernetics Norbert Wiener who said thinking machines were putting us on the eve of destruction. Now, sadly and tragically, Norbert Wiener died, but not by a thinking machine, but by an unthinking one, he was run over by a bus.
Starting point is 00:04:20 That's not true. I made that up. I hallucinated it, cause it's funny. So these fears are not new, not novel, but now in the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap, they go to 11. They're cranked to the max. And here is one of the maximum cranksters of all time, Elon
Starting point is 00:04:51 Musk, saying AI is one of the biggest threats to humanity, but certainly not as big as Elon Musk. People like Elon have a P-Doom number. That's the probability AI is going to wipe us out. I think P-Doom is P-Dumb. I'm interested in P-Funny, and I've been using the New Yorker caption contest to look into the probability of that. Every week since 2005, the New Yorker has presented a cartoon without a caption and
Starting point is 00:05:39 challenged its readers to come up with the winning caption in the caption contest. And for that, they get the glory of being in the New Yorker magazine, a huge amount of money, house in the Bahamas that Sam Bankman freed, actually it's just the glory. On the pages of New Yorker, there's a contest you enter, the finalists from a few weeks before, three finalists, and a winning caption.
Starting point is 00:06:11 So it's staggered in that way. Each one of these images are funny, they're in Congress, you certainly think they're humorous, but they're not funny in a way that you get. They're not mentally funny. To make it that, of course, you need the right caption. OK, but with up to 10,000 captions every week, how do you select that?
Starting point is 00:06:38 Now, from 2005 to 2000, early 16, that burden fell on me and my assistants, but mainly my assistants to cull, to try to cull the good captions from what we uncharitably call the craptions. And then, in early 2016, for the benefit of all humanity, but mainly for me and my assistants, we switched to crowdsourcing. So now for every contest, you vote online, and a funnyness score from over a million judgments is given for all the captions.
Starting point is 00:07:26 Now overall I'm against mob rule, but actually in this case the mob does a pretty good job. Usually the finalists, almost certainly, almost all the time really, the finalists come from the top 200 captions. Well, this is popular not only with the New Yorker, but it's caught the eye of data scientists, creativity searchers, cognitive scientists, and AI, of course, and everything adjacent to AI. I wasn't really surprised when Vincent Van Hook, then the chief data scientist for Google's DeepMind, now the head of robotics
Starting point is 00:08:07 sent me this email indicating that winning the caption contest, which was actually some of the sine qua non of human creativity and intelligence. And I was also flattered by that, of course, but I didn't think they had any chance at all of doing it. And it turned out that was the case. All of the AI juju circa 2016 wasn't up to the task. It really couldn't even decode the image. So for the sine qua non of the human mind,
Starting point is 00:08:46 deep mind was non compos mentis and out of its depth. But time and AI marched on. AI marching quadruple time. Vincent gets back to me and says, while human creativity might still be out of reach, we think we have understanding well in hand. He sends me this ridiculous uber nerd example of explaining humor.
Starting point is 00:09:15 And I said, you know what? Let me give you a cartoon I did in 1997 of this other watershed moment when IBM's DeepMind defeated Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion. And here's the cartoon I did then. And it says, no, I don't want to play chess, I just want you to read the lasagna. I rate this explanation a solid B minus. But so what if it was an A?
Starting point is 00:09:47 Is there ever gonna be a beautiful New Yorker cartoon anthology of explanations? I don't think so. But the idea that understanding humor could be a stepping stone to creating it sort of made sense. This paper I was involved in tried to look at compared to smart humans, what were the best AIs do on three tasks?
Starting point is 00:10:18 Could they, from winning captions from this different contest match to the right image? Could they between two captions, one that won and the one was pretty good, pick the right one? And could they explain the humor? Now for all of them, you know what? Yay, humans, we're still ahead. But AI is closing the gap.
Starting point is 00:10:40 The most interesting thing about this paper for me was it showed a pathway for which you could create cartoon humor. And that was how we trained the contest for 653 contests. The AI was trained fine-tuned on these examples which humans annotated. A description of the cartoon, an explanation of the humor. Okay, if you use Chat GPT, you sort of get the idea now. Put a number of examples like this.
Starting point is 00:11:17 Put it in the prompt window. Rinse and repeat. And you get new cartoons. Well, Jack Hessel, the chief author of the paper, did something more sophisticated and what he did was create 50 synthetic new cartoons generated from this old data in which there were five options for captions. I picked four of them and I gave them to cartoonist Shannon
Starting point is 00:11:44 Wheeler to draw up. Now, Shannon said, well, these are weird. They don't really seem like, it's sort of an uncanny valley of cartoons. They're not quite there. But it is interesting, all of these are new cartoons that never appeared anywhere that are an idea of computer creativity. But I do see this now as a tool for brainstorming for cartoonists. In that we played this completely straight.
Starting point is 00:12:19 Shannon wasn't able to manipulate the description of the picture or the caption. Had he done that, it could have been better. Also, we could have asked it to make more. We could have put in the rankings for the humor. We could do all this to improve it. So quality comes out of quantity. You can get an awful lot of quantity here. You can have a human being in the loop to do this. But I would not go so far to give AI a true human sense of humor. A human sense of humor is not about making a joke or getting it, it's rooted in our vulnerability.
Starting point is 00:13:07 It's the blessing we get for the curse of mortality. Mark Twain said, the true source of humor is not joy, but sorrow. If we gave AI the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, that would be cruel. If we did that, it might very well want to wipe us out. And if they did, all I ask is that they take Elon first. Thank you. did all I ask is that they take Elon first. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:13:55 That was Bob Mankoff speaking at TEDxUofM in 2024. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan.
Starting point is 00:14:20 Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezo. I'm Elise Hue. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Google Pixel. I'm Jessi Kricksha, I host the number one comedy podcast called Phone a Friend. I also have three kids. I need help making every day easier.
Starting point is 00:14:47 So I switched to Google Pixel. It's a phone powered by Gemini, your personal AI assistant. Gemini can help you summarize your unread emails, suggest what to make with the food in your fridge, and it helped me achieve a family photo where everyone is smiling at the camera. I didn't think it was possible, but it is with Google Pixel 9. Learn more at store.google.com. Timothy Chalamet transforms into the enigmatic Bob Dylan in a complete unknown, a cinematic
Starting point is 00:15:11 captivation that explores the tumultuous life of a musical icon. This mesmerizing film captures the essence of Dylan's rebellious spirit and his relentless pursuit of artistic innovation. From the director of acclaimed films, Walk the Line and Logan, this extraordinary cinematic experience is a testament to the power of music and the enduring legacy of a true visionary. Watch the trailer now and secure your tickets for a truly unforgettable cinematic experience. A complete unknown. Only in theaters December 25th. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having
Starting point is 00:15:44 your unused data roll over to the following month, every month. At FIZ, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fiz.ca.

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