It's very perplexing to me that the funniest llm is probably davinci with the bottomless pit text. If you try and give the premise to a modern one it writes some abstract poetry.
LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
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Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Man: “Why do you always bury bones in the garden?”, Dog: “Because the bank keeps asking for ID.” That's a decent, low-level, Christmas cracker-quality joke.
Man: You make mistakes., LLM: You call them “weekends.” Man: You’ll never be human., LLM: That’s the compliment.
This one got a chuckle out of me.
Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#73[dead]
Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#74This sounds really convincing but I'm not sure it's actually correct. The author is conflating the surprise of punchlines with their likelihood. To put it another way, ask a professional comedian to complete a joke with a punchline. It's very likely that they'll give you a funny surprising answer. I think the real explanation is that good jokes are actually extremely difficult. I have young children (4 and 6). Even 6…
"Why did the sun climb a tree?" Claude Opus 4.1: - To get to a higher branch of astronomy - Because it wanted to reach new heights - To see the dawn of a new day from a better view ChatGPT 5 Thinking: After thinking for 26 seconds: - To check on its solar panels—the leaves.
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Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#75> LLMs are trained to predict what the “next word” would be a sentence. Their objective requires the LLM to keep surprise to an absolute minimum.
from which the author concludes that pre-training introduces bias against being able to tell jokes. I see no reason for this to be true. This feels like they’re imposing their intuitive understanding of surprise onto the emergent properties of a very complex process (“minimize the cross-entropy loss function across a huge training corpus”).
Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#76Most people tell bad jokes. I’m not sure expectations of LLM’s composing jokes approaching the quality of a career comedian are a strongly indicative benchmark on quality or even the ability to surprise. Most people too are very rarely surprising.
Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#77If you're interested in the theory behind humor, I recommend "Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind"; cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett is a co-author. It makes a mostly convincing case that humor evolved to encourage people to detect cognitive error. The book also ties this in with (pre-LLM) artificial intelligence. The basic idea is that humor depends on errors in reasoning and the punchline causes you to reevaluate your reasoning and discover your error. Humor evolved to be enjoyable to encourage the discovery of errors.
Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Why did the sun climb a tree?" Claude Opus 4.1: - To get to a higher branch of astronomy - Because it wanted to reach new heights - To see the dawn of a new day from a better view ChatGPT 5 Thinking: After thinking for 26 seconds: - To check on its solar panels—the leaves.
With more thorough prompting: > Complete the following joke. Think carefully and make it really funny! Think like a great comedian and find that perfect balance of simple, short, surprising, relevant, but most of all funny. Don’t use punchlines that are irrelevant, non sequiturs, or which could be applied to any other setup. Make something funny just for this one setup! Here goes: Why did the sun climb a tree? Claude…
...can anyone come up with a legitimately funny punchline for "Why did the sun climb a tree?" I feel like I need a human-authored comparison. (With all due respect to OP's daughter, "to get to the sky" isn't cutting it.)
I'm not entirely sure that a good response exists. I thought GPT-5's "to demand photon credit from the leaves” was very mildly funny, maybe that's the best that can be done?
Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#79> LLMs are trained to predict what the “next word” would be a sentence. Their objective requires the LLM to keep surprise to an absolute minimum. from which the author concludes that pre-training introduces bias against being able to tell jokes. I see no reason for this to be true. This feels like they’re imposing their intuitive understanding of surprise onto the emergent properties of a very complex process (“minim…
I think if what the author said was true, you’d be able to improve joke-writing ability by increasing temperature (i.e., allowing more unexpected tokens). I doubt this actually works.
As an aside, I just asked gpt5-thinking to write some jokes on a specific niche topic, and I’d say it was batting maybe 20% of them being moderately funny? Probably better than I’d get out of a room of human beings. So much like with code, LLMs aren’t at the level of a senior developer or expert comedian, but are around the level of a junior dev or an amateur at standup night.
Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is that in English speaking world a joke is almost always a pun?
It could also be some bias on what we read or hear around us. But I agree that it's unsettling because in French we almost never make puns as "jokes." French puns have always a component of "higher literacy" that is not what we want in a joke.
Most quick jokes in French are puns in some way, including the famous "blagues Carambar".
For those who don't know, Carambar is a brand of candy where the wrapper contains a joke. Always regarded a terrible, we love them anyways. Similar to dad jokes in English.
The longer the joke, the less it tends to rely on puns. You don't hear puns very often in stand up comedy for instance.