Can’t tech a joke: AI does not understand puns, study finds
Comedians who rely on clever wordplay and writers of witty headlines can rest a little easier, for the moment at least, research on AI suggests.Experts from universities in the UK and Italy have been investigating whether large language models (LLMs) understand puns – and found them wanting.The team from Cardiff University, in south Wales, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice concluded that LLMs were able to spot the structure of a pun but did not really get the joke.An example they tested was: “I used to be a comedian, but my life became a joke.” If they replaced this with: “I used to be a comedian, but my life became chaotic,” LLMs still tended to perceive the presence of a pun.
They also tried: “Long fairy tales have a tendency to dragon.” If they replaced “dragon” with the synonym “prolong” or even a random word, LLMs seemed to believe there was a pun there.Prof Jose Camacho Collados, of Cardiff University’s school of computer science and informatics, claimed the research suggested LLMs’ grasp of humour was fragile.“In general, LLMs tend to memorise what they have learned in their training.As such, they catch existing puns well but that doesn’t mean they truly understand them,” he said.
“We were able to consistently fool LLMs by modifying existing puns, removing the double meaning that made the original pun,In these cases, models associate these sentences with previous puns, and make up all sort of reasons to justify they are a pun,Ultimately, we found their understanding of puns is an illusion,”The team concluded that when faced with unfamiliar wordplay, the LLMs’ success rate in distinguishing puns from sentences without a pun can drop to 20%,Another pun tested was: “Old LLMs never die, they just lose their attention.
” When attention was changed to “ukulele”, the LLM still perceived it as a pun on the basis that “ukulele” sounded a bit like “you-kill-LLM”.Sign up to TechScapeA weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our livesafter newsletter promotionThe team was surprised at the creativity, but still, the LLM had not got the joke.The researchers said the work underlined why people should be cautious when using LLMs for applications that need an understanding of humour, empathy or cultural nuance.Their research was presented earlier this month at the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, in Suzhou, China.It is detailed in a paper titled Pun unintended: LLMs and the illusion of humor understanding.
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Hospitals must get smaller to stop NHS ‘permacrisis’, thinktank urges
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Private finance plans for NHS buildings | Letters
Labour MPs are absolutely right to reject Wes Streeting’s plan to use private capital to build neighbourhood health centres (Labour MPs urge Reeves to drop private finance plans for NHS buildings, 21 November). Like a family using a payday loan to buy their home, yes, we’d end up with a building, but we’ll have to sacrifice meals to keep up with the payments.Given Rachel Reeves’s lack of fiscal wiggle room, no one believes that the NHS’s budget will increase year-on-year to keep pace with the combined financial impact of inflation, the growing health needs of our ageing population and possible rising drug prices. So adding a new private finance debt burden to this cocktail will only result in trusts skimping on the only one of those things they have control over: patient care.Research has shown that some trusts pay out more in annual debt repayments for private finance initiatives (PFI) than they do for medicines for patients
Budget 2025: how inflation and the two-child benefit cap have increased poverty
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Bereaved parents face ‘harrowing’ delays for NHS postmorterms
Bereaved parents are enduring “harrowing” delays of more than a year to find out why their child died because the NHS has too few specialist doctors to perform postmortems.The shortage of paediatric and perinatal pathologists is revealed in a report by the Royal College of Pathologists published on Sunday. It warns that the situation is “dire”, services in some parts of the UK have “totally collapsed” and families are paying the price.The NHS has so few of those doctors that in some regions the bodies of babies and children who have died have to be taken elsewhere for examination, for example from Northern Ireland to Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool, the college says.“Our service is in crisis”, said Dr Clair Evans, the chair of the college’s advisory committee that represents pathologists who specialise in the care of under-18s
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