This A.I. Is Learning How to be Human by Doing Improv Comedy

As countless mildly disappointed parents will be happy to tell you, nobody was born to do improv comedy. The A.I. chatbot A.L.Ex -- short for Artificial Language Experiment -- has been built and painstakingly trained to be the best possible scene partner when improvising with a human. Its creators are researchers Kory Mathewson of the University of Alberta and the London-based Piotr Mirowski, who studied deep learning at New York University. The pair see improv as the perfect collaborative art form -- one where the point isn't just to entertain the audience but to make one's partner look as good as possible -- to see how humans and A.I. can work together. "We do not think that machines will replace human actors or comedians," Mathewson tells Inverse in a Twitter message.