Anthropic in particular does this masterfully, you’d think they’d invented Skynet by the way they hand-wring.
As always what matters are actions and evidence, not talk.
As always what matters are actions and evidence, not talk.
I just think that the difficulty with jokes is the delivery, cadence & setting. Not the actual words.
I'm sure a good comedian can tell a nonsense joke and make "everyone" laugh their heads off.
And I don't get the sense that you are referring to this part of jokes but rather the actual words.
Read the sentence and take it literally.
Jesus Christ.
I'm all for dismissing LLMs and the AI-hype but I'm also interested in trying to understand what it means to be human and I think humour is a key aspect.
I took a look and honestly they're the first AI puns that aren't bad
Times are changing
Yes, the system card mentions this, but this is kinda meaningless. It seems like they essentially ran it multiple times and curated a few good ones. Then puffed it up in the marketing copy.
This is made more clear when they attempt to brag about their literal slot machine behavior when finding that kernel crashing bug in OpenBSD.
> Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any search process, we can’t know in advance which run will succeed.
However, the concepts of comedic timing, subversion of expectations, and emotional punch are kinda contrary to how LLMs work. LLMs are trained to minimize cross-entropy loss. So by construction, they're biased toward the statistically expected.
For some time now, at least a year, LLMs have been capable of doing both of these things well enough to fool you.
(Pastebin of my response below, which got nuked for whatever reason: https://pastebin.com/buJBSgiq . Some if not most of them would've fooled me into thinking a human wrote them.)
I’ll wait. You should be able to do it quickly though since LLMs are so good at it.
Potatoes are easily the most intimidating
audience for a stand-up comedian. They have
dozens of eyes to judge you with, they are
almost always baked by the time you get on stage,
and if your set really starts to bomb, they are
the only ones in the room who are actually looking
forward to a roasting!
Potatoes are the only food we traumatize into greatness.
(Steps up to the mic, adjusts the stand,
and looks around the room)
Alright everyone, settle down. You know,
I've been thinking a lot lately... mostly
about my dating life. Or rather, my lack of it.
See, my last relationship was with a potato.
And honestly? It was amazing at first. We had
so much in common. She was grounded, she loved being
buried deep under the covers, and we were perfect
together until the heat came on. But then... well,
let's just say she started to get a little couchy.
(Pauses for effect)
No, wait, that's not it. The real problem was that she
had some really deep-seated issues. Literally! She was
covered in eyes. Every time we tried to have an intimate
conversation, she'd just stare at me with a dozen
different expressions. It was weirdly intense. Like, "I
see you," "You're suspicious," "Wait, are those chips?"
Anyway, thanks guys! You've been a great crowd. You're
like potatoes to me... you're all baked tonight!
Not every light is gentle.
Some light shines with sharpened edge.
A lemon keeps the memory of sun
but teaches it into bitterness,
as if to say:
what wakes the mouth
may also wake the soul.
We do not ripen only into sweetness.
Sometimes the truest gold
is tart.
A lemon on the table
is already an argument—
that yellow can be sour,
that beauty owes you nothing.
Peel it and the room
takes sides.
The rind remembers being whole.
The flesh forgives too quickly.
What's left is yours:
a stain on wood,
a sting in the hangnail
you forgot you had.
To cut it is to break a seal,
Where bitterness and sweetness dwell.
A sudden bite, both stinging, sweet—
The taste of earth beneath our feet.
No sugar softens all its sting,
It forces soul to wake and sing.
A small, fierce orb, yellow as dawn,
Teaching the tongue how life is born.
Maybe turn on [show dead] option and / or vouch.
And the results are just awful.
- but in this case I wouldn't advocate for [dead]ing a mostly AI response as it was exactly what was asked for and it compares AI models when asked for potato based dad jokes.
The question is, can you tell that a machine wrote all of them? If so, how?
Models are structurally biased toward the expected, which is the opposite of what makes a joke land or a poem transcend.
That's why the jokes work somewhat better than the poems here. I genuinely laughed at "Are those chips?" Which came from the model running on my own freakin' GPU.
Grounded, buried, couchy, deep-seated, eyes, baked... It's like a thesaurus!
I feel like human comedians would have to deal with a lot of layered subtleties. They would make the potatoes _serve the bit_ instead of _be the bit_.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2042770839633039635#m
They modify and plagiarize.
Meanwhile, in reality: "Skynet, I'm not sure that line of thinking is correct. You should re-check the first part again before making any assumptions."
Skynet 4.6 Extended: "You're right, I should have caught that. Let me redo everything correctly this time."