Have you heard the one about thealgorithmthat tells hilarious jokes?
Me neither but I have seenAIgags bomb like US presidents.
Moreoftenthan you may think, unfortunately.
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All of these comedians have something in common: theyre not funny.
I dont blame their creators.
Computing humor is so hard itsbeen describedas the holy grail of AI.
Google must have read the reviews, because the firm has moved algorithms from generating jokes to analyzing them.
The company this week unveiled an AI system with a vast range of linguistic skills including explaining gags.
PaLMoutperformed average human intelligencein the logic-focused BIG-bench benchmark and has proved adept at linguistic tasks and code generation.
For example, it can provide high-quality explanations for novel jokes not found on the web.
The researchers then entered the prompt Explain this joke alongside an indication of when the joke starts.
This proved sufficient for the PaLM model to provide pretty impressive explanations.
This ability to understand something as linguistically complex as humor is another step toward human-level intelligence.
If PaLM learns to create jokes as well, we might createAGIsooner than expected.
Story byThomas Macaulay
Thomas is the managing editor of TNW.
He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers.
Away from work, he e(show all)Thomas is the managing editor of TNW.
He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers.
Away from work, he enjoys playing chess (badly) and the guitar (even worse).
