For weeks after his bizarre conversation with Bing's new chatbot went viral, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose wasn't sure what had happened. "The explanations you get for how these language models work, they're not that satisfying," Roose said at one point. "No one can tell me why this chatbot tried to break up my marriage." He's not alone in feeling confused. Powered by a relatively new form of AI called large language models, this new generation of chatbots defies our intuitions about how to interact with computers.

Robots can deliver room service, conduct funeral ceremonies and lead workouts for the elderly. But can they tell a joke? Edmonton audiences can find out, starting next weekend, when local improv artists go head-to-head with artificial intelligence to see who is funnier. Called Improbotics, the show kicks off at 7:30 p.m. at Rapid Fire Theatre (located within the Citadel Theatre at 9828 101A Ave.) and runs Saturday nights from Jan. 12 until Feb. 2. The event is the brainchild of local improv artist and University of Alberta computer science PhD student Kory Mathewson, who has been performing improv for 15 years but began to connect theatre and artificial intelligence about three years ago as part of an improv group known as HumanMachine. HumanMachine consists of Mathewson, a colleague named Piotr Mirowski (an artificial intelligence researcher in London, England, who will not be at the upcoming Edmonton shows) and a piece of equipment known as A.L.Ex, which stands for Artificial Language Experiment -- a computer system that can do speech recognition, improvised dialogue and voice synthesis.

When Kory Mathewson began his PhD in computing science at the University of Alberta, he didn't think it would lead to doing improv on stage with a robot--but that's exactly what happened. Mathewson has two shows in this year's Edmonton Fringe Fest: TEDxRFT, an improv show that riffs on the popular TED Talks videos, and Human Machine, an AI improv show. "The Human Machine AI improv show is part of my PhD work. I'm studying how humans and machine-learning systems interact, and so this show is a little bit of a play on the work that I've been doing," he said. "I've been building dialogue systems, and this show explores how humans and these dialogue systems--like Siri, Alexa or Google Home--play into our lives, and the funny things they say."