BEACHCOMBER 106 YEARS OLD AND STILL JOKING...

THERE has been a great deal of commotion in recent months about Artificial Intelligence in general and the software known as ChatGPT in particular.

I bet you didn’t know that GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”. I suppose the cumbersome nature of that name explains why it is abbreviated to GPT.

Anyway, it is becoming increasingly clear this easily accessed software can write better essays and do homework faster and more accurately than most school pupils, which many teachers find very worrying.

I therefore decided to test it on one of the great problems for AI: jokes.

Computers have never been good at jokes. The basic problem is that computers operate rationally while humour is based on breaking or bending logic, so jokes are a big problem for them.

Recently, several attempts have been made to write joke-generating programs, but they are generally unsuccessful.

They come up with a mixture of bad jokes that are not funny and some almost-good jokes, but the biggest problem is they cannot tell which are good and which are poor. So I decided to run ChatGPT and ask it to tell me a joke I hadn’t heard before. It came up with a joke I already knew, so I pointed out that was not what I requested and asked it to create an original joke. In response it produced the following riddle:

Q: Why did the bicycle fall over?

A: Because it was two-tyred and could not stand up straight any more.

I told it I was impressed, but it would be far better if its answer stopped after “two-tyred”.

It thanked me very politely for my constructive criticism and promised to discuss it with its programmers.

I am left with two explanations: either the computer fibbed about inventing the joke (it claimed to have analysed examples of joke riddles), or computers are on the way to replacing humans as compilers of Christmas cracker riddles.

The first would be a real cause for worry about the future of AI. If computers can learn to fib or answer different questions to the ones they are asked, they will be on the way towards replacing politicians.

On the other hand, if they improve human riddle writing efforts, it is small step for AI, but a giant leap for Christmas crackers.