Good News For Funny People: It’ll Be Awhile Before Machines Take Your Job

By kncitom on August 23, 2018

Computers can do just about everything for us these days, and it’s only going to get worse: self-driving cars, anyone?

BUT, one thing artificial intelligence can’t do yet? Make up jokes. A software engineer named Janelle Shane trained a computer to try and be funny. Or, as she put it on the website IFLScience, ““I train neural networks, a type of machine learning algorithm, to write unintentional humor as they struggle to imitate human datasets. Well, I intend the humor.” She did that by typing in nearly 43,000 versions of basic jokes with the “what do you call a…” and then training the computer to come up with its own jokes based on that style.

Or, something like that. I’m sort of stunned there are 43,000 versions of those kinds of jokes…and that she typed in all of them.

Anyway, here are the fruits of her efforts thus far

I trained a neural network on more than 43,000 jokes and asked it to invent new jokes of its own. https://t.co/kJ4AB8hukX pic.twitter.com/VBIMFDb3WJ

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) June 8, 2018

She is also apparently working on teaching the computer “what do you get when you cross a….” jokes and also knock knock jokes. Check out her Twitter feed for more details on those results…they’re just as unintentionally entertaining as her previous work