A robot walks into a bar: can a Melbourne researcher get AI to do comedy?
Robots can make humans laugh – mostly when they fall over – but a new research project is looking at whether robots using AI could ever be genuinely funny,If you ask ChatGPT for a funny joke, it will serve you up something that belongs 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, a dean’s research fellow in the faculty of fine arts and music, is taking a different approach to working out whether robots can do comedy,Thanks to an Australian Research Council grant of about $500,000, he will train a swarm of robots in standup,And, at least in the beginning, they won’t use words.
“Robots are good at making people laugh … they are humorous because they break and they bump into things, and so we’re laughing at them,” Walton says.“However, when they try to do something funny on purpose, it ain’t so funny any more.We don’t laugh at them because we really, deep down, don’t believe that they can be funny.”Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best readsSaturday Night Live’s Tina Fey said exactly that at this year’s Edinburgh comedy festival.AI is “unable to be funny”, she said.
But what Walton is looking at is not AI based on text or large language models,He is going to start with non-verbal communication, something that has to be performed rather than written,The fundamentals of comedy, he says, are timing, reading the room, the connection with the audience, along with physical comedy such as clowning,So his ensemble of about 10 robots – which will not be androids but ground vehicles between 40cm and 2 metres tall – will work with humans to learn how to be funny visually in the first instance,They’ll sense movement, the way a head tilts, or when someone laughs.
“We’re giving these systems more senses, like human senses … giving them ears, not just listening for words but for things like the gaps in between words, the rhythms of things,” he says.He likens them to babies who don’t yet know how to make sense of the inputs.“That’s partly what we’re trying to do with machine learning and AI – giving it more ways to sense and more ways to build a more holistic understanding of what it means to be in the world,” he says.“It is in standup comedy, really, that the connection between the robot and the audience is so clear, and there’s so much feedback going on.”Asked if eventually they will add voices, Walton says “potentially”.
“Depends how we go,” he adds.There is a tension here, as the performance industry is just one of those where jobs are threatened by AI, and AI steals creative content.Sign up to Five Great ReadsEach week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues.Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morningafter newsletter promotionWalton’s project is not about creating robots that will take over comedy festivals, though, but about investigating whether believable comedy is something robots can be taught, to better understand how machines might use both humour and manipulation, and to better understand human-robot interactions and their risks and benefits.A paradox at the heart of his work, Walton says, is that humour can be used to disarm a situation but can also be used coercively.
He says it might be interesting for comedians to work with robots with comedic timing, but the same techniques could be used, for example, by care robots that can learn to say the right thing at the right time to cheer people up.“But while I’m looking into this work of building belief in comedy performance by machines, I’ve got this other eye on what does it mean, and how might this be used coercively?” he says.Many doubt whether that first step, making robots funny, is possible.At this year’s G’Day USA arts gala, Australian comedian and polymath Tim Minchin told the crowd that humans are interested in “the agency of their fellow human behind the art, struggling, striving, making choices and errors”.“AI might come for the perfectible stuff but never for our flaws,” he says.
“Our flaws are our humanity.”The director of the Melbourne comedy festival, Susan Provan, says what makes comedy enjoyable is “the authentic human originality”.“A performer is bringing something only they can bring, because they are bringing their individual lived experience to the material,” she says.“What’s funny is something that comes from a moment, a magic moment, a pause, an interaction with an audience member, an idea that connects or doesn’t connect.“You’d be laughing at the robot stuffing up.
That’s what would be funny.”
Cloudflare admits ‘we have let the Internet down again’ after outage hits major web services – as it happened
Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours
BP to scrap paid rest breaks and most bank holiday bonuses for forecourt staff
BP is ditching paid rest breaks and most bank holiday bonuses for 5,400 workers in its petrol forecourts as it attempts to offset a planned rise in the independent living wage.The company has told workers in its 310 company-run forecourts that it will be changing their benefits in February. Workers at a further 850 BP-branded forecourts run by partners are on different pay deals.BP is an accredited member of the Living Wage Foundation’s fair pay scheme, under which employers commit to pay staff an annually set wage to meet living costs.Hourly pay for BP’s affected workers will rise to a minimum of £13
Cloudflare apologises after latest outage takes down LinkedIn and Zoom
Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month.“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” it said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures.The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack, it said. Earlier, it said a separate issue had been reported with its application programming interfaces.The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, lasted for half an hour and was resolved shortly after 9am GMT, it said
‘Urgent clarity’ sought over racial bias in UK police facial recognition technology
The UK’s data protection watchdog has asked the Home Office for “urgent clarity” over racial bias in police facial recognition technology before considering its next steps.The Home Office has admitted that the technology was “more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results”, after testing by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of its application within the police national database.The report revealed that the technology, which is intended to be used to catch serious offenders, is more likely to incorrectly match black and Asian people than their white counterparts.In a statement responding to the report, Emily Keaney, the deputy commissioner for the Information Commissioner’s Office, said the ICO had asked the Home Office “for urgent clarity on this matter” in order for the watchdog to “assess the situation and consider our next steps”.The next steps could include enforcement action, including issuing a legally binding order to stop using the technology or fines, as well as working with the Home Office and police to make improvements
Lando Norris wins F1 world title in Abu Dhabi despite Verstappen’s GP win
Lando Norris has won his first Formula One world championship with a gutsy, nerveless drive of no little bravery to seal it with third place at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. A podium was enough for the 26-year-old British driver despite Red Bull’s Max Verstappen winning and his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri taking second.Norris did exactly what was required of him in an enormously intense and high-pressure contest at the Yas Marina Circuit, including making a series of bold overtakes, with a flawless execution by himself and by his McLaren team.In taking his first world championship he becomes the 11th British driver to do so and it brings to an end McLaren’s drivers’ championship drought, which stretched back to 2008, when Lewis Hamilton last won it for the team. It had been 27 years since McLaren last secured the drivers’ and constructors’ double in 1998, with Mika Häkkinen
Ben Stokes says England have been ‘letting the pressure get to us’ in Ashes
Ben Stokes has admitted that the way England have folded in key moments during the first two Ashes Tests has led him to question the character of his players, and insisted: “A dressing room that I am captain of isn’t a place for weak men”.After Australia won the second Test in Brisbane by the same eight-wicket margin with which they secured the first, Stokes suggested the telling difference was that the home side had been superior in the “moments in the game where the heat is on and the pressure is really, really cooking” whereas his players “have all been guilty at moments [of] letting the pressure, the occasion, the circumstances, get to us”.“Over and over again, Australia have managed to get through those periods and outdo us,” Stokes said. “I know it’s not a skill thing, because they’re all incredibly talented players. But if you can’t put it down to skill then you start to wonder, what is it? Do we need to start thinking about what mentality we’re taking into those pressure moments?“Because when we’re on top we’re great, but when the game is neck and neck we’re not coming out on top on enough occasions to be able to challenge Australia
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