Pretend for a minute you’re the captain of a ship that’s being attacked by enemy cannons. Your crew is panicking. Now – say something funny.
Making up jokes on the spot is a real test of wits. Yet two comedians have developed an improv show in which many of the ad-libbed gags are delivered by a toy robot. In the last couple of years this – known as HumanMachine – has performed 30 times to nearly 3000 people at comedy festivals in the UK and Canada.
It’s not all played for laughs, however. Kory Mathewson at the University of Alberta in Canada and Piotr Mirowski – both artificial intelligence researchers in their day jobs – also wanted to explore how audiences would respond to a robot that was trying to be funny.
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Humour goes to the heart of what it is to be human. Laughter can bring people together by up-ending shared assumptions.ĚýIt typically happens when the perceptions and intuitions of the performer and of the audience are challenged by surprise or novelty. Jokes often rely on allusions to pop-cultural references, social satire, irony and empathy. “In other words, understanding and creating comedy involves high-level intelligence,” says Mirowski.
“If one were to attempt the Turing Test, I find it hard to envision success without an AI that understands humour,” says Mark Riedl at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who works on story-generating AIs. Riedl considers making up stories on the fly to be one of the grand challenges for AI. Adding in humour raises the bar even higher. “Humour is hard even for humans,” says Riedl.
Does not compute
During the shows, Mathewson, Miroski and their robot called A.L.Ex – short for Artificial Language Experiment – improvised using topics suggested by the audience. The robot’s lines were provided by a neural network that had learned a vocabulary of around 50,000 words by reading subtitles from around 100,000 films. On stage, A.L.Ex had to understand what its human sidekicks were saying and generate a response as quickly as possible, which the robot then delivered using a voice synthesizer.
Things didn’t always work out. At a show in January at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London, the robot started talking gibberish, . “The performers covered well but they were just unlucky on the night,” she wrote. Even when A.L.Ex got its words out, the results were not always funny:
HUMAN: Captain, the ship is under attack. The frigate is arriving…
A.L.Ex: You see, I don’t feel the same way. I just don’t want to stay in the position to get burnt.
HUMAN: We’re all going to get burned by a cannon fire…
A.L.Ex: While you’re in there, tell me. When I get dressed, I’ll go up there and see what happens.
Parrot fashion
Even so, many audiences responded warmly. When the robot was controlled by A.L.Ex they were never fooled into thinking the AI was really a human. But when it was secretly controlled by Mathewson, half of the people who saw the show thought that they were watching an AI perform flawlessly.
But that says more about the set-up than the robot’s smarts. A.L.Ex has no understanding of what’s actually being said. “Our chatbot is just a natural language processing parrot,” says Mirowski. But the pair point out that audiences at a comedy show are primed to find things funny, which will make them more receptive to the AI’s efforts. And having A.L.Ex’s lines spoken by a small, funny-looking robot also puts people on side.
More than testing the intelligence of a machine, Mathewson and Mirowski are exploring how far they can push an illusion. “We think of this as an exercise for human improvisers,” says Mirowski. “Our task is to make the robot look great when we perform with it.”
The pair are presenting their work at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Long Beach, California, this week. They also plan to hit the road again next year, performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and elsewhere. “We are hard at work thinking about other ways to involve humans in the show,” says Mirowski.
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