{"id":16086,"date":"2015-08-13T01:48:09","date_gmt":"2015-08-13T08:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/08\/microsofts-new-ai-is-capable-of-spotting-a-good-joke"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:25:24","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:25:24","slug":"microsofts-new-ai-is-capable-of-spotting-a-good-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/08\/microsofts-new-ai-is-capable-of-spotting-a-good-joke","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft\u2019s new AI is capable of spotting a good joke"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/microsofts-new-ai-is-capable-of-spotting-a-good-joke.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As great as computers are at crunching their way through millions of numbers in just a few seconds, they\u2019re not well known for having deep emotions or a sense of humour \u2014 until now. A new artificial intelligence system developed by Microsoft has been trained to spot the funniest submissions to the ongoing <em>New Yorker<\/em> cartoon caption competition. Indeed, the software has been developed partly out of necessity, with so many entries flooding in that the human editors can\u2019t cope.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe process of looking at 5,000 caption entries a week usually destroys [my editorial assistant\u2019s] mind in about two years, and then I get a new one,\u201d the <em>New Yorker<\/em> cartoon editor Bob Mankoff <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2015-08-10\/and-the-new-yorker-cartoon-contest-winner-is-a-computer\">explained to Bloomberg<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit daunting. It\u2019s like going snow blind; you go humour blind.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s why Mankoff has been working alongside Microsoft researchers Dafna Shahaf and Eric Horvitz in developing the new humour-sensitive AI software. Of course, the program needs to be trained in what\u2019s funny and what isn\u2019t, because it doesn\u2019t have an innate sense of what makes something witty: by feeding in thousands of previous submissions, the AI gets a large database of previous responses to work from.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/microsoft-s-new-ai-is-capable-of-spotting-a-good-joke\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As great as computers are at crunching their way through millions of numbers in just a few seconds, they\u2019re not well known for having deep emotions or a sense of humour \u2014 until now. A new artificial intelligence system developed by Microsoft has been trained to spot the funniest submissions to the ongoing New Yorker [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,23,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-humor","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16086"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69730,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16086\/revisions\/69730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}