
AI and Common Sense
Large Language Models and paraprosdokian one-linersAn LLM will never write a joke that gives another LLM a good honest belly laugh.
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An LLM will never write a joke that gives another LLM a good honest belly laugh.
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Corinne Purtill reported a year ago at Time Magazine on Jon the Robot, a chatbot that was programmed to learn to tell stand-up comedy jokes: 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. Corinne Purtill, “Artificial Intelligence Can Now Craft Original Jokes—And That’s No Laughing Matter” at Time 2030 (January 4, 2022) But the robot’s act is more human than it might first Read More ›

There’s an old joke about the bored engineering student slouched in the back of the Remedial English Grammar and Composition class. The instructor was lecturing on the use of negatives. In some languages, she explained, negatives can be piled on top of one another without changing the overall negative (“no”) meaning. But in English, adding two negatives together creates a positive. For example: “I am never going there again.” means just what it says (“never”). but “I am not ‘never going there again’” means that maybe you are going there again (“yes, if some changes are made”). The first negative negates the second. The teacher went on to say, “But there is no language in the world in which two Read More ›