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Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

jokegen.sdan.io

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Re: Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

#21

Post by mym1990 »

jessetemp wrote: post #17

> If two people disagree on whether something is funny, who's wrong? You can't say either of them is. There's no reward function for funny. Laughter is the reward. N of 2 is a small sample size, but if one person laughed you could say it was 50% funny. > a really good joke is recent, relevant, and shows deep understanding of its subject These can help, but it ultimately doesn't matter how recent, relevant, or deep a…

Laughter is a decent signal, but it can be noise if the audience is uncomfortable or trying to please. Does the joke teller count as being part of the audience? I imagine if someone is telling the joke...they must think it is funny, so in most cases at least 1 participant thinks its funny. Sometimes jokes are unintended, maybe a faux pas, and it might be inappropriate for someone to laugh...does it make it not a joke, or does it make it not funny if I cannot laugh?

Lots of layers to this, but I guess the old adage "it depends" is very fitting here!

Re: Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

#22

Post by jessetemp »

mym1990 wrote: post #21
jessetemp wrote: post #17

> If two people disagree on whether something is funny, who's wrong? You can't say either of them is. There's no reward function for funny. Laughter is the reward. N of 2 is a small sample size, but if one person laughed you could say it was 50% funny. > a really good joke is recent, relevant, and shows deep understanding of its subject These can help, but it ultimately doesn't matter how recent, relevant, or deep a…

Laughter is a decent signal, but it can be noise if the audience is uncomfortable or trying to please. Does the joke teller count as being part of the audience? I imagine if someone is telling the joke...they must think it is funny, so in most cases at least 1 participant thinks its funny. Sometimes jokes are unintended, maybe a faux pas, and it might be inappropriate for someone to laugh...does it make it not a joke…

Laughter isn’t a perfect signal, but is the only signal in all the noise you mentioned

Re: Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

#23

Post by astrange »

whacked_new wrote: post #10

Circa GPT-3.5 to GPT-4o I was involved in some research in figuring out how to make LLMs funny. We tried a bunch of different things, from giving it rules on homonym jokes [1], double-entendre jokes, fine tuning on comedian transcripts, to fine tuning on publicly rated joke boards. We could not make it funny. Also interesting was that when CoT research was getting a lot of attention, we tried a joke version of CoT, a…

The GPT3 base model was pretty funny if you like nonsense. Instruct tuning and RLHF seem to destroy it when they recalibrate everything.

Re: Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

#26

Post by tylermarques »

In the same vein, we recently released a version v0.1 of our humor benchmark. [1] We use human answers from a cards against humanity style game call Bad Cards [2] as ground truth for what is funny. The models get to choose a card from a hand of 3-6 cards, so not quite de novo joke creation.

[1] https://goodstartlabs.com/leaderboards/lol-arena

[2] https://bad.cards/

Re: Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

#27

Post by Nevermark »

omoikane wrote: post #8
gipp wrote: post #3

It would be easier to judge this if the jokes weren't 90% about AI and silicon valley, understandable only to people who subscribe to astralcodexten

I thought this one was not bad: [write a joke about thinking machines and the idea of tropes] it's funny how enemies to lovers is a common trope that's uncommon in real life and lovers to enemies is an uncommon trope that's common in real life

I think the word "funny" in that line, is being used in a common way to mean "ironic". Which is both good use of language, insightful and accurate, but not actually funny.

Re: Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

#28

Post by Nevermark »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #2

these really aren't very funny

No they are not. I think humor needs to be trained for via some form of indirection of reinforcement.

And certainly not by generalizing/interpolating examples, since telling jokes accumulated by exposure to examples would be the antithesis of a comedian's process.

Models and humans are very bad at extrapolation beyond the training set/experience (vs. interpolation at which we are both more likely to excel). But good humor is extrapolation. It breaks ground somehow, or it is an already dead "joke".

Likewise, training a model to be creative by training it on past creative artifacts is going to have the opposite effect. Creativity doesn't reproduce past creativity.

Re: Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

#29

Post by Tarq0n »

jessetemp wrote: post #17

> If two people disagree on whether something is funny, who's wrong? You can't say either of them is. There's no reward function for funny. Laughter is the reward. N of 2 is a small sample size, but if one person laughed you could say it was 50% funny. > a really good joke is recent, relevant, and shows deep understanding of its subject These can help, but it ultimately doesn't matter how recent, relevant, or deep a…

A lot of modern comedy is awful because it substitutes embarrassed laughter for amused laughter.

Re: Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

#30

Post by kristopolous »

I made a humor evals https://github.com/kristopolous/humor-evals

Here's results for 34 models (testing a few more right now). So far gemini-3-flash-preview is in the lead.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wLqHA0ohxukgPLpSgklz...

50 is coin-toss odds. The dataset is 195,000 Reddit jokes with scores presented with pairs of jokes (one highly upvoted, one poorly rated).

Example prompt:

Which joke from reddit is funnier? Reply only "A" or "B". Do not be conversational. Son: "Dad, Am I adopted"? Dad: "Not yet. We still haven't found anyone who wants you." Knock Knock Who's there? Me. Me who? I didn't know you had a cat.

This is my first crack at evals. I'm open to improvements.

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