by Angela Guess
Glenn McDonald recently wrote in Yahoo Tech, “Artificial intelligence is capable of some very sophisticated kinds of thinking. IBM’s Watson, for instance, can not only compete in game shows, it can also perform high-level medical analysis and even create gourmet recipes. Artificial neural networks — the brainlike core of cutting-edge A.I. systems — are making great strides in real-time translation and image recognition. But one thing artificial intelligence can’t do is tell a joke. In fact, despite decades of research, computers are nowhere close to being able to generate, or even recognize, humor. It’s pretty astonishing, really. Researchers haven’t just had limited success with teaching computers to be funny — they’ve had virtually no success at all.”
McDonald goes on, “That hasn’t stopped them from trying. A recent report over at MIT Technology Review details the latest attempt to introduce artificial intelligence to the elements of comedy. It appears that researchers at Virginia Tech have developed a complex A.I. system designed to discern between humorous clip-art cartoons and regular illustrations. In short, they’re trying to get A.I. to recognize funny pictures. Inscrutable New Yorker cartoons aside, that’s something we humans can usually manage before pre-school even kicks in. But computers have a hell of a time wrapping their digital brains around the idea of humor. Details on the Virginia Tech experiment are fascinating. To train the system to recognize humor, the team amassed a database of 6,400 images, half of which were intended to be humorous, half not. The A.I. system was then encouraged to create a database of the thing it’s trying to learn — in this case, what’s ‘funny’.”
photo credit: Pen Waggener