😺 ChatGPT's comedy flop

PLUS: Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington team up

Welcome, humans.

The AI-powered humanoid robot from Figure is now assembling cars at a BMW plant in South Carolina.

TBH, if an AI can go from barista to BMW builder in six months, maybe I should let one start managing my LinkedIn DMs for me— it's gotta do a better job than using way too many smiley faces and signing off all my inmail messages as “Chief Meme Officer @ The Neuron” :)

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

AI’s comedy career bombs on opening night.
Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington are collabing on an AI health coach.
An AI-generated video from Runway blew our minds.
Nvidia is raking in profits by selling AI chips to China despite restrictions.

DeepMind says we're gonna need AGI before AI can spit out a decent zinger.

When it comes to getting those LOLs, humans are still the kings and queens of comedy. At least, that's what a fresh study from Google DeepMind suggests.

The researchers got 20 comedy pros to write comedic material with ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, and Google Bard (Dec 2023 edition) during a 45-minute laugh workshop last year.

Turns out, while AI can help comics structure their jokes, they're about as hilarious as your great Uncle trying to painfully recreate that one Dave Chappelle bit verbatim at Thanksgiving dinner...which is to say, not very funny.

One comic described the AI's output as “cruise ship comedy from the '50s, just a tad less racist.” Yikes.

While the comics agreed the AI wasn’t ready for the stage, they did mention that the models were useful for:

Quickly whipping up rough drafts.
Outlining a basic structure to build off of.

But to really get the crowd ROFL’ing, a human touch was essential, which might be the case for some time.

As one AI expert explained, humor demands "frame-shifting" between different layers of knowledge (think switching between various perspectives or contexts), so machines might need "human-level intelligence" before they can match our comedic timing.

In other words...to test for true superintelligence, we should swap the Turing Test for the “Seinfeld test”: get a group of hard-to-please New Yorkers to laugh at your open mic.

Our two cents? TBH, we’re not surprised. Comedy is tough. That said, we couldn't resist testing the researcher’s findings with the latest models. So we asked Claude and ChatGPT-4o to write us a punchline for this story.

Here’s how they did:

ChatGPT 4o: “Why did the comedian cross the road? To get away from the LLM workshop!”
Claude: “Why did the AI comedy writer get booed off stage? It kept spitting out punch cards instead of punchlines!”

Not quite the killer punchlines we were looking for…

Will AI eventually be able to be funny?

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Around the Horn.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington announced that they’re building a personalized AI health coach.
Nvidia will make $12B from AI chips in China, despite U.S. export restrictions.
OpenAI updated its ChatGPT Mac app to encrypt your chats so bad actors can’t access your chat convos with ChatGPT.

Treats To Try.

*Seance AI is a free chatbot from AE Studio that made headlines as an MVP. Users answer a few questions about a loved one for a custom interactive experience.
EverArt lets you train an AI image generator on any product, style, or mood board.
Gradio is a fast way to share and let people demo your AI apps and models.
Voice Isolator from ElevenLabs can remove background noise from any film, podcast, or interview.
Readsss transforms your Twitter feed into a daily podcast you can listen to.

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

Tuesday Ticker.

Here are the results from the last TWO polls:

A.C. chose Claude 3.5 Sonnet: “As you and others have said: Claude just get it.”
M.M. chose ChatGPT-4o: “I can’t live without my custom GPTs.”
T.M. chose Claude 3.5 Sonnet: “They both have their uses but Claude seems to be better at more natural interaction. I use both sometimes as a way of getting different 'opinions'”.