Getting Serious About Humor: Can AI Understand Jokes?

"I like my coffee like I like my war. A couple of years after a pair of scientists at the University of Washington wrote a program that correctly added "that's what she said" at the end of a sentence 72% of the time, researchers at the University of Edinburgh decided to give it a go. They trained a model on large amounts of language data to create jokes following the "I like my X like I like my Y, Z" structure, producing jokes like the one above, or the far less funny "I like my women like I like my camera … ready to flash." Sure, it looks like a joke, and sounds like a joke, but many argue that it lacks the fundamental part when it comes to comedy -- it just isn't funny. It turns out that while computers are infinitely better than us at many a task, they just aren't great at cracking jokes. But that hasn't stopped researchers from building comedy-generating algorithms. And despite how enjoyable it must be to watch a machine struggle to come up with a decent joke, the reason why so ...