
Botnik, an AI-assisted humor application - gk1
https://www.wired.com/story/botnik-ai-comedy-app/
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King-Aaron
"Ever since the 1990's, when the Internet was a very small book with buttons,
about the size of a coconut, we were thinking of robots. Robots that can tell
stories about animals swimming through media industries. Robots that are
designed to get published online. Robots that are on fire and in love."

Perfection

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slazaro
I found the fake reviews surprisingly laugh-out-loud funny. I think it's
because it retains the structure, it's not total nonsense because close words
are linked properly (like markov chains), but at a higher level it makes no
sense, making it absurd in the end. So it sounds like a parody of the original
texts it's based on.

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dogruck
This is cool. A few reactions:

1\. Comedy writing is much more skill-based and formulaic than many people
realize. Most people could learn how to write good jokes, just like most
people could learn to play basic Go. (Beating Lee Sedol or Paul Mooney is
another thing)

2\. The resulting comedic quality is subjective. I agree with other commenters
that several were LOL worthy.

3\. Comedy has a long tradition of building on prior comedy, so this feels
like a perfect area for building on curated corpuses.

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YeGoblynQueenne
With a bit of training I'm fairly certain I could beat Paul Mooney at Go.

Also, I'm pretty sure that this kind of quipping can't be easily automated.
You need to be able to figure out why beating Paul Mooney at Go is not such a
big deal as beating Lee Sedol at it _and_ why this could be considered a funny
association to make in the context of the above sentence. This is actually
hardcore AGI stuff, well beyond our current reach.

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dogruck
Hehe, indeed. Long way to Go.

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ukulele
Humor should be a good target for machine learning, since it's less intuition
based and more based on repeatedly trying to be funny and gauging people's
responses all the while.

Though it seems more "human" than some of the other ML tasks (eg be the best
at Go), I wouldn't be surprised if comedy ends up being a highly successful
application for these algorithms.

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theoh
By "intuition" you must mean instinct -- but this isn't a separate category
from learned behaviour for an AI that can be trained over the equivalent of
many generations.

In any case, botnik is not an autonomous AI, and humans are responsible for
the important decisions (is this incongruous word funny?) when composing a
text with it. So it's a long way from AI humour.

