Data

Design

The evolution of Funnybot

Lately I’ve been investigating ways to make an algorithm say funny things. This seems quite an easy topic, but it has been a struggle from the beginning, let me explain you why.

I came to this matter true a very interesting TedxSBU about an Artificial intelligence chatbot called BINA48, the presenter of this talk is Stephanie Dinkins who’s a transmedia artist.
Dinkins has been talking to BINA48 since August 2014 and is trying to develop a long-term friendship with BINA48 with emotions and empathy.
While Dinkins is talking to BINA48 you notice that the chatbot is sometimes jumping from one topic to another very randomly, I find this really funny and this was the starting point to my project.

I started to write simple algorithms like: “write a sentence down, find the topic of this sentence, search for the opposite of this word, replace the topic by this word”. So “I love coffee!” would become: “I hate coffee!”.
However, after doing this I found out that many words don’t have an opposite word, and if they do in almost all cases it wasn’t funny at all!

I wanted to know how other people integrated humor into their Ai’s, I searched on the web for examples and found multiple articles, one of them was an article by Ted Idea’s, written by Kevin Litman-Navarro. He points out a variety of examples where Machine learning researchers try to teach a Neural network how to create jokes.

None of these researchers however was capable of creating an Algorithm that was capable of actually making an algorithm that made this happen.
He Ren and Quan Yang for example trained a neural network to intimidate the humor of Conan O’Brian, looking back their estimation is that 12 percent of the attempts where rated funny by humans, and some of them only generated laughs because they were so nonsensical.

This made me think, until now I tried making a sentence unexpected by adding an Algorithm, but because the Algorithm was so simple the outcome would not be random anymore, and you could foresee what would happen after the Algorithm did its thing.
This meant it wasn’t funny anymore and I knew I had to change some things.

This is the moment I came back to BINA48, I thought it would be interesting to create an AI chatbot who is only capable of telling jokes that are only funny because they don’t make sense.

Funnybot is the result.
Funnybot is a Neural Network driven chatbot who’s capable of telling jokes, opening and closing his mouth, moving his head and blink.

Dinkins is saying that she’s struggling to present BINA48 as an art piece, because it’s not art as people know art. I can relate to this; I think people will say the same about Funnybot.
For me however he is an interesting art piece and think its important people keep in seeing the positive sides of Ai.