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Researchers at the University of Sydney used an AI-assisted application to help people write captions for cartoons featured in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.
Twenty participants with little or no experience writing comic captions wrote 400 comic captions. 200 captions were written with the help of his AI tools and the rest without any assistance.
A second group of 67 people then rated how funny the captions of these cartoons were. Researchers found that jokes written using the tool were much funnier than those written without the tool. By comparison, the AI-assisted caption was rated almost 30% closer to the winning caption in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.
Participants said the tool helped them piece together and start humorous stories, understand nuances and funny elements, and come up with new ideas.
Of the 200 jokes written with the help of AI, nearly half, 95, were rated funnier by The New Yorker than the original cartoon captions.
“AI tools can help make people more interesting, but more importantly, it has the potential to cure writer's block,” said Dr. Anusha Wisana of the Computer Science and Digital Science Initiative .
AI helps non-native speakers become interesting with new languages
Dr. Withana and his team have devised a tool to help non-native speakers understand humor in a new language. The results showed that non-native speakers found the tool more helpful, and he was 43% closer to the winning caption.
Dr Withana, who was born in Sri Lanka and has lived in Japan, Singapore, Germany and now Australia, said understanding local humor can often be a “minefield” for newcomers.
“I often felt like I was 'out of tune' in a new country,” he says. “For example, I once made a sarcastic comment that was unpopular in Germany. It would have been laughed at here in Australia.”
Hasindu Kariyawasam led the research project as an undergraduate research intern. The survey results are Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces..
“Humor is a very important way to relate to others,” he said. “It's also important for emotional well-being, creativity, and managing stress, depression, and anxiety. As a non-native speaker myself, this system has made writing jokes easier and the experience more enjoyable. I understand.”
How can AI help us understand humor?
The original goal of this research was to use technology to unleash creativity and put words on a page. Her master's student and amateur cartoonist Alistair Palmer came up with the idea to get more people involved in comics.
The tool works through an algorithm that assesses discomfort. It analyzes the words contained in manga descriptions and generates words that seem strange as hints for manga artists.
For example, in one cartoon depicting a person wearing a rabbit suit to work, the tool suggested the words “rabbit” and “soup” (due to the discomfort with the word “suit”). One participant in the pilot study came up with the caption, “I meant rabbit soup, not suits.” The winning caption in the New Yorker contest was, “Henderson wasn't the only one. The company fired the entire bunny department.”
Professor Judy Kaye said this approach meant she could explain how AI worked, adding: “As AI plays a bigger role in our lives, our team is confident that people will be able to take control of themselves. “We wanted to create this tool to help people feel like they're doing it.”
Dr Withana said: “While ultimately humans are still the creators of humor, this study is a great example of how AI can enhance and support our social interactions.”
For more information:
Hasindu Karyawasam et al., A suitable discomfort-driven human-AI collaboration tool to assist beginners in humorous content generation; Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. (2024). DOI: 10.1145/3640543.3645161
