Does Not Compute! Does Not Compute! The Hows and Whys of Giving AIs a Sense of Humour

BSTRACT For much of its history, AI was a scientific discipline defined more by its portrayal in science fiction than by its actual technical achievements. Real AI systems are now catching up to their fictional brethren, and are as likely to be seen in news headlines as on the big screen. Yet as AI systems match or even outperform people on tasks that were once considered yardsticks of human intelligence, one area of human experience still remains largely unchallenged by technology: our sense of humour. This is not for want of trying, as I will show. The true nature of humour has intrigued scholars for millennia, but AI researchers can go one step further than philosophers, linguists and psychologists once could: by building computer systems with a sense of humour, capable of appreciating the jokes of their human users or even of generating jokes of their own, we can turn academic theories into practical realities that amuse, explain, provoke and delight. This talk sets out to challenge the archetype of the rigidly humourless machine in popular culture, and to make a case for the necessity of a truly computational understanding of humour. By giving our machines the ability to understand and generate humour – including sarcasm and irony – we can better understand ourselves too, as we construct machines that are more flexible, more understanding, and more willing to laugh at their own limitations.