Ask HN: Is humor the next frontier for LLMs?
Not so long ago, we used to think that machines could be considered intelligent/creative/conscious/<some attribute deemed quintessentially human> if they could write a sonnet/summarize a book/paint a portrait/tell a joke, or whatever. Back then, all these tasks seemed technologically far beyond our reach.
Today, some of those have been achieved: even if they don't produce truly _good_ poems, LLMs are already better than the median human effort in poetry [1]. The same goes for paintings, essays, and so on.
Yet humor remains a tough nut to crack. LLM-generated jokes often suffer from:
- off rhythms or pacing
- missing or telegraphed punchlines
- unintentionally absurd twists
- over-explanation of their own process
- reliance on weak wordplay
So, could humor be the next frontier for LLMs? That is, not as evidence that they are intelligent/creative/conscious/<some attribute deemed quintessentially human>, but as the next area that is easy for humans yet hard for machines. Or am I just a bad prompter?
[1] Humans actually seem to prefer AI-generated poetry: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1