Jokes can be reduced to formulas. Just about anything can be reduced to a formula, but “funny” isn’t a thing. It’s a perception. Just like you can’t hand me an ounce of satisfaction or purchase a mile’s worth of courage, you can’t quantitatively produce funniness in a lab.

The AI picks a noun or verb from a headline and replaces it with a word that can be objectively quantified as humorous.

So here’s the simple answer to the question of whether AI can be funny or not: If you get to define what is and isn’t funny, sure. AI can be just as funny as you decide it...

Robots don’t have personalities, ideas, thoughts, or desires. Any human-like qualities we could attribute to a machine or its output are merely reflections of ourselves or its programmers.

That doesn’t sit well with the mainstream perceptions of AI. Thousands of articles promise a near-futu...

Most of what AI does is prestidigitation. That’s because there’s only a handful of things a typical deep learning system can actually do. Much like a real-world magician, developers create incredible programs out of some fairly basic algorithmic foundations.

The only differ...