AI Humor Generation: Cognitive, Social and Creative Skills for Effective Humor

Sean Kim; Lydia B. Chilton

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arXiv · 2502.07981

AI Humor Generation: Cognitive, Social and Creative Skills for Effective Humor

Sean Kim·Lydia B. Chilton

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Abstract

Humor is a social binding agent. It is an act of creativity that can provoke emotional reactions on a broad range of topics. Humor has long been thought to be "too human" for AI to generate. However, humans are complex, and humor requires our complex set of skills: cognitive reasoning, social understanding, a broad base of knowledge, creative thinking, and audience understanding. We explore whether giving AI such skills enables it to write humor. We target one audience: Gen Z humor fans. We ask people to rate meme caption humor from three sources: highly upvoted human captions, 2) basic LLMs, and 3) LLMs captions with humor skills. We find that users like LLMs captions with humor skills more than basic LLMs and almost on par with top-rated humor written by people. We discuss how giving AI human-like skills can help it generate communication that resonates with people.

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Sean Kim, Lydia B. Chilton. 2025-02-11. AI Humor Generation: Cognitive, Social and Creative Skills for Effective Humor. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07981

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