Robots can make humans laugh, mostly when they fall down, but a new research project is looking at whether AI-powered robots can actually laugh.
Ask ChatGPT for a funny joke and you'll get a Christmas Cracker-worthy joke: “Why don't skeletons fight each other? Because they don't have the courage.”
Dr Robert Walton, a Dean's Research Fellow in the School of Art and Music at the University of Melbourne, is taking a different approach to studying whether robots can perform comedy.
Thanks to a grant of about $500,000 from the Australian Research Council, he will train a swarm of stand-up robots. And they don't use words, at least not at first.
“Robots are good at making people laugh. They break things and hit things, so it's humorous. That's why we laugh at robots,” Walton said.
“But when they intentionally try to be funny, it's not funny anymore. We don't laugh at them because deep down we don't believe they're funny.”
Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey said just that at this year's Edinburgh Comedy Festival. AI is “incapable of being funny,” she says.
But Walton isn't focused on AI based on text or large-scale language models.
He plans to start with nonverbal communication, which needs to be performed rather than written. According to him, the basics of comedy are timing, reading the scene, connecting with the audience, and physical comedy such as clowning.
So his roughly 10 robots (not androids, but ground vehicles ranging from 40 centimeters to 2 meters tall) will work with humans to learn how to make them visually interesting in the first place.
They sense things like movement, the way your head tilts, or when someone smiles.
“We're giving these systems more senses, like human senses. We're giving them ears that don't just hear words, but hear things like the gaps between words and the rhythm of things,” he says.
He likens them to babies who don't yet know how to understand what is input.
“This is also part of what we're trying to do with machine learning and AI: give them more ways to build a more holistic understanding of what it means to be in the world,” he says.
“In stand-up comedy, the connection between the robot and the audience is very clear, and there's a lot of feedback happening.”
When asked if audio would eventually be added, Walton said, “That's a possibility.” “It depends on how we proceed,” he added.
There is tension here, as the performance industry is just one industry where AI threatens jobs and where AI steals creative content.
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However, Walton's project is not about creating robots to take over comedy festivals, but rather to investigate whether believable comedy can be taught to robots, to better understand how machines use both humor and manipulation, and to gain a deeper understanding of human-robot interaction and its risks and benefits.
Walton says the paradox at the heart of his work is that humor can be used to defuse a situation, but it can also be used to force it.
He said that while it might be interesting for comedians to collaborate with robots for comedic timing, the same technique could also be used for caregiving robots that could learn to say the right words at the right time to cheer people up, for example.
“But while I examine this effort to build belief in comedic performance by machines, I have a different perspective on what it means and how this can be coerced into use,” he says.
Many people wonder if the first step of making robots interesting is possible.
At this year's G'Day USA Arts Celebration, Australian comedian and polymath Tim Minchin told the audience that humans are interested in “the struggles, the struggles, the choices, the mistakes, of our fellow humans behind the art.” “AI may come to us looking for perfection, but it will never come to us for our flaws,” he says.
“Our flaw is humanity.”
Melbourne Comedy Festival director Susan Proban says what makes comedy fun is “true human ingenuity”.
“Performers bring something that only they can bring, because they bring their own lived experiences to the material,” she says.
“Interesting comes from moments, magical moments, pauses, interactions with the audience, ideas that connect or don’t connect.
“You'll laugh when you see a robot doing stuffing. That'll be funny.”
