{"id":179752,"date":"2025-12-07T18:46:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T18:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/179752\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T18:46:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T18:46:08","slug":"a-robot-walks-into-a-bar-can-a-melbourne-researcher-get-ai-to-do-comedy-artificial-intelligence-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/179752\/","title":{"rendered":"A robot walks into a bar: can a Melbourne researcher get AI to do comedy? | Artificial intelligence (AI)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robots can make humans laugh \u2013 mostly when they fall over<\/a> \u2013 but a new research project is looking at whether robots using AI could ever be genuinely funny.<\/p>\n

If you ask ChatGPT for a funny joke, it will serve you up something that belongs in a Christmas cracker: \u201cWhy don\u2019t skeletons fight each other? Because they don\u2019t have the guts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The University of Melbourne\u2019s Dr Robert Walton, a dean\u2019s research fellow in the faculty of fine arts and music, is taking a different approach to working out whether robots can do comedy.<\/p>\n

Thanks to an Australian Research Council grant of about $500,000, he will train a swarm of robots in standup. And, at least in the beginning, they won\u2019t use words.<\/p>\n

\u201cRobots are good at making people laugh \u2026 they are humorous because they break and they bump into things, and so we\u2019re laughing at them,\u201d Walton says.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, when they try to do something funny on purpose, it ain\u2019t so funny any more. We don\u2019t laugh at them because we really, deep down, don\u2019t believe that they can be funny.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saturday Night Live\u2019s Tina Fey said exactly that at this year\u2019s Edinburgh comedy festival. AI is \u201cunable to be funny\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n

But what Walton is looking at is not AI based on text or large language models.<\/p>\n

He is going to start with non-verbal communication, something that has to be performed rather than written. The fundamentals of comedy, he says, are timing, reading the room, the connection with the audience, along with physical comedy such as clowning.<\/p>\n

So his ensemble of about 10 robots \u2013 which will not be androids but ground vehicles between 40cm and 2 metres tall \u2013 will work with humans to learn how to be funny visually in the first instance.<\/p>\n

Dr Robert Walton, dean\u2019s research fellow in the faculty of fine arts and music at University of Melbourne. Photograph: Charlie Kinross\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

They\u2019ll sense movement, the way a head tilts, or when someone laughs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re giving these systems more senses, like human senses \u2026 giving them ears, not just listening for words but for things like the gaps in between words, the rhythms of things,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He likens them to babies who don\u2019t yet know how to make sense of the inputs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s partly what we\u2019re trying to do with machine learning and AI \u2013 giving it more ways to sense and more ways to build a more holistic understanding of what it means to be in the world,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is in standup comedy, really, that the connection between the robot and the audience is so clear, and there\u2019s so much feedback going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked if eventually they will add voices, Walton says \u201cpotentially\u201d. \u201cDepends how we go,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

There is a tension here, as the performance industry is just one of those where jobs are threatened by AI, and AI steals creative content<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Walton\u2019s project is not about creating robots that will take over comedy festivals, though, but about investigating whether believable comedy is something robots can be taught, to better understand how machines might use both humour and manipulation, and to better understand human-robot interactions and their risks and benefits.<\/p>\n

A paradox at the heart of his work, Walton says, is that humour can be used to disarm a situation but can also be used coercively.<\/p>\n

He says it might be interesting for comedians to work with robots with comedic timing, but the same techniques could be used, for example, by care robots that can learn to say the right thing at the right time to cheer people up.<\/p>\n

\"RobotsRobots run, punch and score at World Humanoid Robot Games in China \u2013 video<\/p>\n

\u201cBut while I\u2019m looking into this work of building belief in comedy performance by machines, I\u2019ve got this other eye on what does it mean, and how might this be used coercively?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Many doubt whether that first step, making robots funny, is possible.<\/p>\n

At this year\u2019s G\u2019Day USA arts gala, Australian comedian and polymath Tim Minchin told the crowd that humans are interested in \u201cthe agency of their fellow human behind the art, struggling, striving, making choices and errors\u201d. \u201cAI might come for the perfectible stuff but never for our flaws,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur flaws are our humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The director of the Melbourne comedy festival, Susan Provan, says what makes comedy enjoyable is \u201cthe authentic human originality\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cA performer is bringing something only they can bring, because they are bringing their individual lived experience to the material,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s funny is something that comes from a moment, a magic moment, a pause, an interaction with an audience member, an idea that connects or doesn\u2019t connect.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019d be laughing at the robot stuffing up. That\u2019s what would be funny.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robots can make humans laugh \u2013 mostly when they fall over \u2013 but a new research project is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-179752","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}