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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

We're all going to become philosophers of "Chinese Rooms"[0] at this rate.

The plain fact is, ChatGPT is demonstrating a major step forward towards artificial general intelligence. It can't perfectly explain jokes, especially puns, but it's pretty darned close.

What happens next is what always happens next with AI. When it can identify and explain something, someone puts it in reverse and asks it to make jokes instead. HumourDiffusion v0.1, coming next week, and it will make you laugh more than half the comedians on TV. Version 7 will write sitcoms that are actually funny. Version 21 will win a Pulitzer.

Perhaps ChatGPT is what Peter Watts predicted in "Blindsight"[1] - intelligence without consciousness.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

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It can generate good jokes, with a lot of luck: https://sigmoid.social/@maxy/109480669994012863

ChatGPT made me think of blindsight too. Great read.

+1 Blindsight. I had not connected ChatGPT to intelligence without consciousness, but that is absolutely perfect.

A fragment of the relevant South Park episode “Funnybot”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dsYnYEwa-qc

"The plain fact is, ChatGPT is demonstrating a major step forward towards artificial general intelligence. It can't perfectly explain jokes, especially puns, but it's pretty darned close."

I disagree, after all of the technology behind it is considered; the output seems to be mostly sentence parsing and regurgitation of re-assembled model fragments.

We don't have a good understanding of how human intelligence works, so it doesn't seem reasonable to critique AI by only looking at the implementation details.

>after all of the technology behind it is considered

This reminds me of Sagan's “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”. If we consider any achievement based on what went into it, this is the only reasonable halting condition.

I think the issue is, that this approach will lead to limitations. And with ChatGPT it's unclear to me whether there's any party tricks going on as well.

With jokes it could be algorithmic thing that will try to parse all of it, and it would not be a very impressive algorithm.

You just bruteforce weighted connections based on inputs to find what might match the best.

I don't know if it was able to recognise how pun jokes work by themselves or someone programmed it the idea of puns.

Is there logic in the code that says that it should look for multiple meanings if it's a joke or was it able to do that just from training?

If there's logic, then it just becomes bruteforcing when it knows that the current context is a "Joke", I should look for whether it could be a "pun" joke, or it could be a "unexpected ending" type of joke, and when I think it matches pun the best I would check all words to see which ones have double meaning.

I guess better question is. If you don't tell it, that something is a joke, would it be able to realise there's something funny or a pun in something someone said, without anyone instructing it to look out for that.

Sure, but can you really say that a lot of people aren't doing just the same thing? (I only half joke)

Experience with ChatGPT hopefully will make us more aware of confident nonsense, even when it comes from humans.

I think ChatGPT may be sort of intuition, gut feel type of thing that people will get a quick feeling based on input, but it won't be something that is able to do novel thought or critical thinking.

I think you have failed this particular Turing test. ChatGPT is on another planet from general intelligence. It has the ability to impress a lot of people, but it is no closer to reliable and responsible behavior and relationships than Eliza was.

It misunderstood every joke. It wasn’t close. It repeated stock pabulum about subverting expectations without ever knowing what was subverted. If the OP had not told it that there was a joke in the room it would not have known.

This is Clever Hans 2022.

“Humorbots” also don’t understand humor, any more than kittens understand why humans care for them, and yet they are kittens.

It's a very good trick though.

Seems to particularly captivate and impress bright technologists, subverting our expectations by taking in a group that should be less easily swayed, in a way that is unexpected and humorous!

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