Can AI laugh? We investigated

Author: Evan Fleischer / Source: Big Think

I tried to make a piece of Artificial Intelligence laugh.
The A.I. was powered by a library of transcripts by stand-up comedians.
It has been hypothesized that social laughter releases an opioid that helps solidify long-term human relationships.

I recently heard about a project put together by a student at MIT where an A.

I. was built on the back of stand-up comedian transcripts in order to see if it could determine what was and wasn’t funny based on what it heard from the everyday public. Not too long after I heard about the project — dubbed The Laughing Room — I found and decided to visit the project in person hoping to get a sense of what it was like and to see what role I could play in getting the machine to laugh.

The Laughing Room was a project put together by Jonny Sun and Hannah Davis that was tucked into the corner of the Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Minus the laptops, the camera, the audio output and the recording equipment, the room was set up to resemble a sitcom-like living room: there was a couch, two adjoining chairs, and books related to comedy left all over the table. The glass wall ensured that the room was well lit.

I came into the room late, and you can watch my brief appearance on the seven-hour live stream above. (I come in around 3:01:44.) Four other people were already there. There were three young students who knew each other on the couch and an elderly woman sitting on the chair across from me. She was in the middle of running through a few personal tests of the machine of her own: what she saw on a sweater (the machine didn’t laugh), an infamous comic from XKCD (the machine didn’t laugh), and a single line — “It gives me the hydrostatics to such a degree” — from an eighteenth century comic play (which the machine loved.)

Using the last point as a prompt, I turned in the general direction of the camera and — levying the falling point of a finger — said, “All right. Next up: The Iceman Cometh. Go.”

The group and the two people monitoring the equipment laughed. A pause.

I abandoned the beat almost immediately, sailing away from the awkward and exploitable silence with a quick, “No?”

The machine laughed.

The creative part of my brain immediately assigned a motive of suspicion to the machine. (A motive that could well have been warranted if we’re to factor in what