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hubie writes:

No one can really agree on what makes each of us laugh, so designing an artificial intelligence (AI) system with a sense of humor is enormously challenging:

Since at least the time of inquiring minds like Plato, philosophers and scientists have puzzled over the question, "What's so funny?" The Greeks attributed the source of humor to feeling superior at the expense of others. German psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed humor was a way to release pent-up energy. US comedian Robin Williams tapped his anger at the absurd to make people laugh.

It seems no one can really agree on the question of "What's so funny?" So imagine trying to teach a robot how to laugh. But that's exactly what a team of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan are trying to do by designing an AI that takes its cues through a shared laughter system. The scientists describe their innovative approach to building a funny bone for the Japanese android 'Erica' in the latest issue of the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

[...] In the shared-laughter model, a human initially laughs and the AI system responds with laughter as an empathetic response. This approach required designing three subsystems – one to detect laughter, a second to decide whether to laugh, and a third to choose the type of appropriate laughter.

[...] The type of laughter is also important, because in some cases a polite chuckle may be more appropriate than a loud snort of laughter. The experiment was limited to social versus mirthful laughs.

There are still plenty of other laughing styles to model and train Erica on before she is ready to hit the stand-up circuit. "There are many other laughing functions and types which need to be considered, and this is not an easy task. We haven't even attempted to model unshared laughs even though they are the most common," Inoue noted.

Of course, laughter is just one aspect of having a natural human-like conversation with a robot.

"Robots should actually have a distinct character, and we think that they can show this through their conversational behaviors, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style," Inoue added. "We do not think this is an easy problem at all, and it may well take more than 10 to 20 years before we can finally have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend."

Journal Reference:
Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala and Tatsuya Kawahara, Can a robot laugh with you?: Shared laughter generation for empathetic spoken dialogue [open], Front. Robot. AI, 2022. DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2022.933261

Original Submission