“If you could master any language in the world, what would it be?” “C++.”
It’s a classic programming joke. The humor is ironic: language skills are less important than technological ones. Humor, I’m told, doesn’t flourish in tech. Computers can’t understand it.
And, some would argue, neither can engineers.
But the computer bit isn’t quite accurate. Chatbots based on large language models, like ChatGPT, don’t understand things the way we do.
But with enough data, they can communicate like us. They can even repeat jokes when prompted, just like some seniors I know.
So maybe they can tell jokes, but only if they’ve heard them before. After all, chatbots predict the next word in a phrase based on billions of similar inputs.
In some sense, we do this too. Practice makes… perfect. Knowledge is… power. When life gives you lemons… make a whiskey sour.
When life gives a language model some lemons, it probably won’t make a whiskey sour. For humans, A isn’t always A. For computers, it has to be.
Unless it’s been told otherwise a hundred times, a computer will always make lemonade out of lemons.
So they don’t work with words exactly how you do, unless you compare a phrase you’ve heard with a hundred others before you reply (and generate something random every now and then).
Though you can argue that humans make meaning based on what we’ve heard before, with some variations, we can’t reduce language to data processing, especially when that data consists only of the written word.
There’s more to jest than the wording of the joke. Language is more than writing. It flows, stops short, and is punctuated with gestures and sounds that aren’t words.
Some sounds are funnier to humans than others. “Klaxon” is funny. “Stolid” is not. “Diphthong” is funny. “Melody” is not. “Whack” is funny. “Antidisestablishmentarianism” is long.
Copyright 2024 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.