In this position paper, we review the eclectic recent history of academic and artistic works involving computational systems for humor generation, and focus specifically on live performance. We make the case that AI comedy should be evaluated in live conditions, in front of audiences sharing either physical or online spaces, and under real-time constraints. We further suggest that improvised comedy is therefore the perfect substrate for deploying and assessing computational humor systems. Using examples of successful AI-infused shows, we demonstrate that live performance raises three sets of challenges for computational humor generation: 1) questions around robotic embodiment, anthropomorphism and competition between humans and machines, 2) questions around comedic timing and the nature of audience interaction, and 3) questions about the human interpretation of seemingly absurd AI-generated humor. We argue that these questions impact the choice of methodologies for evaluating computational humor, as any such method needs to work around the constraints of live audiences and performance spaces. These interrogations also highlight different types of collaborative relationship of human comedians towards AI tools.

Social robotics researchers are increasingly interested in multi-party trained conversational agents. With a growing demand for real-world evaluations, our study presents Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in a month-long live show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This case study investigates human improvisers co-creating with conversational agents in a professional theatre setting. We explore the technical capabilities and constraints of on-the-spot multi-party dialogue, providing comprehensive insights from both audience and performer experiences with AI on stage. Our human-in-the-loop methodology underlines the challenges of these LLMs in generating context-relevant responses, stressing the user interface's crucial role. Audience feedback indicates an evolving interest for AI-driven live entertainment, direct human-AI interaction, and a diverse range of expectations about AI's conversational competence and utility as a creativity support tool. Human performers express immense enthusiasm, varied satisfaction, and the evolving public opinion highlights mixed emotions about AI's role in arts.

Don't you hate it," says Jon the Robot, gesturing with tiny articulated arms at an expectant crowd, "when you're trying to solve inverse kinematics equations to pick up a cup and then you get'Error 453, no solution found'?" An experiment billed as a comedy act, Jon is the brainchild of Naomi Fitter, an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. The tiny android performs when a handler (who must also hold the mic) presses a button, then tells the same jokes in the same order, like a grizzled veteran comic at a down-market Vegas casino. But the robot's act is more human than it might first appear. Jon is learning how to respond to its audience--it can now vary the timing of its delivery based on the length of the audience's laughter, and append different responses to jokes based on the level of noise in the room. It can deliver one line if a joke gets a roar of laughter ("Please tell the booking agents how funny that joke was") and another if there are crickets ("Sorry about that.

Have you heard the one about a robot who walks into a bar? "What can I get you?" asks the bartender. "I need something to loosen me up," says the robot. So the bartender serves him a screwdriver. I'll bet you wouldn't have guessed that a computer wrote it – @jokingcomputer. Here's another one told by a computer: So how does Artificial Intelligence (AI) do when it comes to that most human of storytelling activities-- telling jokes?

It was 7:55 p.m. on a Saturday night, and I had just arrived at a small improv workshop and stage space in San Francisco's Mission District. Mere moments after I sat down, someone placed a stool in front of the stage, draped a red cloth over it and placed what would turn out to be an integral part of the evening's performance: an Amazon Echo. It wasn't there to tell jokes -- it's notably not a very good comedian. Instead, it was both prop and participant in a unique improv show called "Alexa, Improvise." From mechanical comics to riffing robots, the integration of artificial intelligence and comedy have been attempted before, with varying degrees of success.

"I'm sure that you will find love," the robot said after an awkward pause, drawing a firm end to the couple's relationship, and prompting laughter from the audience. "I'm so tired," it added. Mr. Mirowski made a final attempt to save things, but the robot would not listen. You're my friend," it said, emotionless. For someone who had just been dumped in front of a paying audience, Mr. Mirowski looked happy. Because the A.I. he created had worked, and stuck to the topic at hand -- a rare event, he said later in an interview. For the past few years, A.I. has been generating attention -- and alarm -- in many areas of arts and culture. Start-ups and tech giants are developing A. I. systems that can write music, for example, while others are using the technology to generate art. Some fear these projects will put musicians and artists out of work. Using computers to make comedy has received less attention, but it has a surprisingly long history. In the early 1990s, researchers at the University of Edinburgh wrote a program that could produce question-based puns such as "What do you call a good-looking taxi?

Navigating familiar areas like the streets of your childhood neighborhood is less about carrying around a map and more about remembering what's around the corner. This comes almost naturally to humans and animals, but can a computer learn to walk the streets of New York City the same way? A team of computer scientists at the tech company's artificial intelligence wing, DeepMind, have developed an A.I. that can travel city streets by simply exploring them on foot. The group exclusively used images from Google Street View to turn their A.I. into a bonafide city slicker by just setting it loose in picture renditions of cities like Paris, London, and NYC. "The task of navigation can be solved by answering two questions," Piotr Mirowski, first author of this research, tells Inverse. And how do you get to where you want to go?

Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospect of Artificial Intelligence, Pamela McCorduck, San Francisco, California, Freeman, 1979, 375 pp., ISBN 0-7167-11135-4. McCorduck's Machines Who Think after Twenty-Five Years The frame tale provided therein was basically that AI was "an idea that has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized" (p. The primary principle of selection governing her account is that AI "did not originate in the search for solutions to practical problems…. I like to think of artificial intelligence as the scientific apotheosis of a veritable cultural tradition" (p. However, recent historical research, which includes a reexamination of McCorduck's own interview transcripts, has begun to uncover other possible narratives, es-Book Review It is a tribute to her powers of observation and her conversational style that none has really proven more successful than Pamela McCorduck's Machines Who Think, Currently, it is the first source cited on the AI Topics web site on the history of AI.

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.