Microsoft Creates an AI That Can Spot a Joke In a New Yorker Cartoon 66
An anonymous reader writes: For over a decade Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor at the New Yorker, and his assistants have gone through 5,000 cartoon entries for the magazine's caption contest each week. Needless to say, the burnout rate of his assistants is quite high, "The process of looking at 5,000 caption entries a week usually destroys their mind in about two years, and then I get a new one," Mankoff says. But now thanks to a collaboration with Microsoft, Bob may finally have found the perfect helper. Researchers have been working on an artificial intelligence project to teach a computer what's funny. Fortune reports: "Dafna Shahaf, a researcher at Microsoft, used the database of cartoons to train the program to understand commonalities and differences in the millions of cartoons, which lets the AI run through the entries the New Yorker receives each week for its back-of-magazine cartoon caption contest. About 55.8% of the time the humans agree with the captions the AI selects, which is a pretty good percentage."
If the goal is to write captions for a new yorker (Score:1)
... the bar couldn't be any lower. Not even if it were for Family Circus.
Re: (Score:3)
An AI and a cartoonist walk into a bar.... (Score:3)
The bartender looks at the cartoonist and says "is this some kind of joke?". The cartoonist looks at the AI and says to the bartender and says, "Give him a minute."
Re: (Score:2)
The pig says, "my wife is a slut"?!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
What they actually did. (Score:5, Informative)
The paper is a bit confusing at first, and the /. summary doesn't help. Basically, they developed a sorting criteria to reduce the amount of work for the editors. In an isolated comparison of two jokes, the funnier joke wins 64% of them on average; this is quite better than a coin!
To get a sorted list, they run a "comparison tournament" between the jokes. The 55.8% number means that the funniest joke is in the top 55.8% of the list on average; if we are willing to occasionally miss a brilliant joke, we can cut the list in a little more than half and still keep most of the great jokes.
The full paper is http://research.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That's only true if its picking the best of two options.
Re: (Score:2)
55% chance is not much better than flipping a coin
If there were only two captions to assess, you'd be correct. But there are 5000 to choose from, and even then the "right" answer is subjective, so 55% is a remarkably high figure.
Re: (Score:2)
"55% chance is not much better than flipping a coin"
Which is fortunate, because an AI that achieved an 80-85% rate on New Yorker cartoons would have to have evolved at a star considerably older than the Sun.
Re: (Score:2)
2:1 would be for a two headed coin, but what if there were 100 sides to it?
Finding "humour" in New Yorker cartoons is a joke (Score:5, Funny)
The New Yorker cartoons are about as un-funny as they get. So Microsoft is claiming they can detect something that doesn't even exist.
Re: (Score:2)
yes, they are very dry
i get them now, as an adult
as a kid looking over old copies at my grandfather's house. it was mystifying: here was a cartoon, something i understood, but they were alluding to topics and humor that was utterly beyond me
No it can't (Score:5, Funny)
But... (Score:2)
Can it tell when the New Yorker is stealing jokes from Ziggy?
LOL ... (Score:2)
Somewhere, that headline is it's own punchline.
I'm picturing George Burns or Jackie Mason delivering that to uproarious laughter.
The good news is, it might be able to explain the joke to the rest of us.
Re: (Score:1)
You cannot formulate everything human (Score:2)
Comedy varies from one person to the next, one society to the next, and hell, even one joke teller to the next.
That might be an interesting Turing Test: you win when your machina can tell me one of those laugh till it hurts, "Please stop, please stop!" jokes.
My Own Algorithm (Score:2)
int CountNewYorkerCartoonJokes( Bitmap *image )
{
return 0;
}
Well then (Score:3)
1) Computers will ever only be as smart as the people who program them
2) That we never have to worry about them being smarter than us because only a race of morons would even bother trying find the humor in a New Yorker comic
AI torture (Score:3)
Isaac Asimov (Score:2)
Feeding jokes into a computer? ;-)
What could possibly go wrong?
Short Story by Isaac Asimov, Jokester:
http://www.epubsbook.com/Scien... [epubsbook.com]
Great, another filtering algorithm (Score:4, Funny)
.
Microsoft Bob? (Score:5, Funny)
Did anyone else misread:
as
Re: (Score:2)
Crap, forgot to tick 'post anonymously' again
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I also read that. I was like, dang, I thought they killed that awful thing ages ago, now it's back, and reading jokes?
Too many significant digits. (Score:2)
About 55.8% of the time the humans agree with the captions the AI selects, which is a pretty good percentage
My old prof (RIP Prof Swaminathan) in the freshman physics lab would insist on us doing an error estimate based on the instruments used. He would then chew our ears out if we report a result with more significant digits than what would be reasonable based on the error estimate. Three significant digit accuracy for this study? Or is that the joke?
Re: (Score:2)
If they are going through 5000 jokes a week and comparing whether a human assessment and computer assessment agree, there are at least 3 sig figs to work with. You could add some additional measurement uncertainty, I suppose, but you are already measuring something subjective - are you worried about incorrect button clicks or something?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
"Ouch!" They say. A Unix admin slides beneath the bar and asks them, "Why don't you try looking where you are going?"
It was the best I could do.
easy AI (Score:2, Troll)
function doesJokeExist(NewYorkerCartoon cartoon)
{
return 1;
}
That's unpossible. (Score:2)
There are no jokes in New Yorker cartoons.
Computers performing tasks that people can't... (Score:3)
Such as finding humor in New Yorker cartoons.
I'll take (Score:2)
That's what she said... (Score:2)
That article is pretty light on actual information...anyway, here's a paper about getting machine learning to recognize opportunities for "that's what she said":
http://www.aclweb.org/antholog... [aclweb.org]
Funny? (Score:2)
AI goes insane (Score:2)
New Yorker is formulaic and repetative? (Score:1)
Mutations behind autism hints of future therapies (Score:1)
Recent papers have reported dramatic progress in identifying some
of the mutations responsible for autism, which in some cases
seem reversible.
One study, which will appear in Cell (paywall:/dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.06.045), identifies
protein kinase A (PKA) as an upstream regulator of the
autism-linked ubiquitin ligase protein UBE3A. A UBE3A mutation,
disrupts this regulation, leading to excessive UBE3A activity
against itself and ultimately to snaptic dysfunction. The authors suggest that
a phosphodiesteras
Re: (Score:1)
Please ignore the previous comment. It was posted to this thread by mistake.