What do you get when you cross Chinese AI with comedy?
- Researchers have been working on a model that comes up with humorous responses and testing people’s reactions
But a team of Chinese scientists is trying to solve the problem in collaboration with their international peers, developing a model that can crack its own jokes and comment on images it encounters in the way many internet users do.
Which may highlight the basic problem they face: that humour is entirely subjective, depends on context and cultural factors and is notoriously hard to translate.
But while admitting “the humour generated here may hit differently for everyone”, the researchers from Sun Yat-sen University in southern China, with collaborators from Singapore Management University and Harvard University are hoping to one day create a model that can boost creativity.
In a survey of 154 internet users, the AI’s jokes in English, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese were judged funnier than comparable models such as LLaVA-1.5 by Microsoft Research and GPT-4v by OpenAI.
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