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A Robot Walks into a Bar: Can Language Models Serve as Creativity Support Tools for Comedy? An Evaluation of LLMs' Humour Alignment with Comedians
arxiv.orgWe interviewed twenty professional comedians who perform live shows in front of audiences and who use artificial intelligence in their artistic process as part of 3-hour workshops on ``AI x Comedy'' conducted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2023 and online. The workshop consisted of a comedy writing session with large language models (LLMs), a human-computer interaction questionnaire to assess the Creativity Support Index of AI as a writing tool, and a focus group interrogating the comedians' motivations for and processes of using AI, as well as their ethical concerns about bias, censorship and copyright. Participants noted that existing moderation strategies used in safety filtering and instruction-tuned LLMs reinforced hegemonic viewpoints by erasing minority groups and their perspectives, and qualified this as a form of censorship. At the same time, most participants felt the LLMs did not succeed as a creativity support tool, by producing bland and biased comedy tropes, akin to ``cruise ship comedy material from the 1950s, but a bit less racist''. Our work extends scholarship about the subtle difference between, one the one hand, harmful speech, and on the other hand, ``offensive'' language as a practice of resistance, satire and ``punching up''. We also interrogate the global value alignment behind such language models, and discuss the importance of community-based value alignment and data ownership to build AI tools that better suit artists' needs.
No i’m saying comedy (as in writing your jokes for you) is not something you should expect from language models. As a general rule, there is no tool that will make you a good writer, only (potentially) tools that can help you do more with your qualities as a writer. But it will never be funnier or more talented than you are.
That’s why i personally experiment with writing tools. Writing standup is one thing, but imagine you’re writing a sitcom or any form of serialized work. That’s a lot of fucking work and obviously if you’re starting out you can’t exactly afford to pay for assistant writers to do the menial labour that comes with it. Language models can come in handy in that scenario, but again you can’t expect them to be the genius in the room if you want a good show you have to bring the good ideas and the funnies. It’s a power tool and power tools don’t draw the plans for the house they just grind where you need grinding.
Give this promptfucker the props they deserve: usually they don’t just come out and say it.