Robots can make humans laugh – mostly when they fall over – but a new research project is looking at whether robots using AI can actually be funny.
If you ask ChatGPT for a funny joke, it’ll give you something that sounds like it’s in a Christmas cracker: “Why don’t skeletons fight each other? Because they don’t have the guts.”
The University of Melbourne’s Dr Robert Walton, who is the Dean’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, is taking a different approach to finding out whether robots can do comedy.
Thanks to an Australian Research Council grant of almost $500,000, he will train a swarm of robots in Standup. And, at least in the beginning, they won’t use words.
Walton says, “Robots are good at making people laugh… They’re humorous because they break and bump into things, and so we’re laughing at them.”
“However, when they intentionally try to do something funny, it’s no longer as funny. We don’t laugh at them because we don’t really, deep down, believe they can be funny.”
That’s exactly what Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey said at this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Festival. AI, he said, is “capable of being funny”.
But what Walton is seeing is not AI based on text or large language models.
He is going to start with non-verbal communication, something that has to be demonstrated rather than written. He says the fundamentals of comedy are timing, reading the room, connecting with the audience, as well as physical comedy like clowning.
So their group of about 10 robots – which won’t be androids but ground vehicles between 40cm and 2 meters tall – will work with humans and learn how to be visually funny firsthand.
They will sense movement, such as when the head tilts, or when someone laughs.
“We’re giving these systems more senses like human senses… giving them ears, not just hearing words but also hearing things like the intervals between words, the rhythm of things,” he says.
He compares them to children who do not yet know how to understand the meaning of input.
“That’s partly what we’re trying to do with machine learning and AI – giving more ways to understand it and more ways to create a more holistic understanding of what it means to be in the world,” he says.
“It’s really in standup comedy that the connection between the robot and the audience is so obvious, and there are so many reactions going on.”
When asked if they would eventually add voices, Walton says, “Potentially”. “It depends on how we move,” he adds.
There’s a tension here, because the performance industry is one of those where jobs are threatened by AI, and AI steals creative content.
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However, Walton’s project is not about creating robots that will take over comedy festivals, but rather about investigating whether believable comedy is something that can be taught to robots, to better understand how machines can use both humor and manipulation, and to better understand human-robot interactions and their risks and benefits.
A paradox at the center of his work, Walton says, is that humor can be used to defuse a situation, but it can also be used to coerce a situation.
He says it might be interesting for comedians to work with robots with comedic timing, but the same technology could be used for, for example, caring robots that could learn to say the right thing at the right time to make people happy.
“But as I’ve been looking at this work of machines building trust in comedy performances, I’ve been looking at what does this mean, and how can it be used coercively?” He says.
Many people doubt whether the first step, making robots fun, is possible.
At this year’s G’Day USA art festival, Australian comedian and polymath Tim Minchin told the crowd that humans are interested in “the agency, struggle, effort, choice making and errors of your fellow human being behind the art.” He says, “AI may come to perfect things but never to our flaws.”
“Our imperfections are our humanity.”
Susan Provan, director of the Melbourne Comedy Festival, says that what makes comedy enjoyable is “authentic human originality”.
She says, “An artist is bringing something that only they can bring, because they’re bringing their personal life experience to the material.”
“What’s funny is something that comes from a moment, a magical moment, a pause, an interaction with an audience member, an idea that connects or doesn’t connect.
“You’ll be laughing at the robot stuffing it. That’s the fun.”
