Humor is a broad and complex form of communication that remains challenging for machines. Despite its broadness, most existing research on computational humor traditionally focused on modeling a specific type of humor. In this work, we wish to understand whether competence on one or more specific humor tasks confers any ability to transfer to novel, unseen types; in other words, is this fragmentation inevitable? This question is especially timely as new humor types continuously emerge in online and social media contexts (e.g., memes, anti-humor, AI fails). If Large Language Models (LLMs) are to keep up with this evolving landscape, they must be able to generalize across humor types by capturing deeper, transferable mechanisms. To investigate this, we conduct a series of transfer learning experiments across four datasets, representing different humor tasks. We train LLMs under varied diversity settings (1-3 datasets in training, testing on a novel task). Experiments reveal that models are capable of some transfer, and can reach up to 75% accuracy on unseen datasets; training on diverse sources improves transferability (1.88-4.05%) with minimal-to-no drop in in-domain performance. Further analysis suggests relations between humor types, with Dad Jokes surprisingly emerging as the best enabler of transfer (but is difficult to transfer to). We release data and code.

But in honour of Father's Day, it's time to finally shake off the embarrassment, and to fully embrace the'dad joke' in all its glory. While all fathers think they have the best jokes, we turned to AI chatbot, ChatGPT, to come up with a list of ultimate gags. From one-liners to predictable puns, these 20 jokes are bound to have even the most serious reader chuckling. To celebrate Father's Day, we asked ChatGPT: 'What are the ultimate dad jokes?' Within seconds, the AI bot came up with a list of 20 jokes, writing: 'Here are some of the best dad jokes that are sure to get a laugh (or a groan).' Topping the list is'Why don't skeletons fight each other?

Jon the Robot uses artificial intelligence to determine where to jump next in his human-written script. Jon can tell a joke has fallen flat, Fitter says, and then make a quip on the joke's failure, attempting to repair the interaction. "It might be poking fun at the audience, trying to guess why they didn't like the joke," Fitter says. The majority of the time, when the robot tried to rescue the joke, it improved the audience's reaction, a result Fitter finds "promising."

In today's world of generative AI chatbots, we've witnessed the sudden rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT, introduced in November, followed by Bing Chat in February and Google's Bard in March. We decided to put these chatbots through their paces with an assortment of tasks to determine which one reigns supreme in the AI chatbot arena. Since Bing Chat uses similar GPT-4 technology as the latest ChatGPT model, we opted to focus on two titans of AI chatbot technology: OpenAI and Google. We tested ChatGPT and Bard in seven critical categories: dad jokes, argument dialog, mathematical word problems, summarization, factual retrieval, creative writing, and coding. For each test, we fed the exact same instruction (called a "prompt") into ChatGPT (with GPT-4) and Google Bard.

Alexa, are you eavesdropping on me? I passive-aggressively ask my Amazon Echo this question every so often. Because as useful as AI has become, it's also very creepy. And this, of course, produces privacy nightmares, as when Amazon or Google subcontractors sit around listening to our audio snippets or hackers remotely spy on our kids. The problem here is structural.

Adding canned laughter to a punchline increases how funny people find a joke, a new study suggests. The research indicates that artificial laughter - often used in shows such as Alan Partridge, Friends and The Big Bang Theory - makes people rate low-quality jokes as funnier than they actually are. However, spontaneous laughter was deemed more effective than pre-planned. Scientists from University College London said the findings also held up in those diagnosed with autism. In the study, 40 groan-worthy gags were given a baseline humour rating of between one - not funny - and seven - hilarious.

Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa are useful for a lot of things, like telling you what the weather's going to be or reminding you of an upcoming calendar appointment. But they can be entertaining too, providing the occasional fun fact or playing that hit song from Beyonce. Or, when you want a little levity in an otherwise crappy day, telling some really corny dad jokes. You've probably heard them before. Ask Siri, Alexa, Google or Cortana to tell you a joke, and you'll likely hear something like this: "I couldn't figure out why a baseball kept getting larger. "What do you call a talking dinosaur?