Dr. David Eagleman

That's interesting because it depends, right?

A little child actually finds that joke funny.

And for a little child, they then get to repeat that to their classmate and they're learning how to do a joke and so on.

So I'm not sure I think there's a single answer to whether that can be funny or not.

Yeah, but remember, all it's doing is it's just, it's a statistical parrot.

And so when you say be brutally honest, it thinks that's what it should answer.

Well, that's quite good.

That's quite accurate.

Here's the thing.

I've been thinking about this issue a lot about whether AI can be funny.

And at the moment, it can't be.

It's great at repeating jokes, but it doesn't understand humor on its own.

If you ask it to make up a new joke, what it'll do is it'll have the first guy walks in the bar, then the second guy walks in the bar and does X, and that establishes the pattern.

But then the third guy, it'll have break that pattern, which is the structure of a joke.

But it doesn't know how to break the pattern in a way that's funny.

It's just the third guy does some random thing.

So AI as it stands now, the way it's structured with what's called a transformer model, doesn't know how to think of the punchline and then go back and make the joke lead to that punchline.

A lot of people don't either.

Creativity in the brain, all creativity is, is you absorb your world, the whole world around you, every experience you've ever had.

And then you're bending and breaking and blending things.