How do LLMs handle humor? From what I understand, they basically learn by guessing what word comes next based on tons of text they’ve seen. Over time, they get better at it by adjusting their internal weights.

So when you ask them to tell a joke, they can do it because they’ve come across lots of jokes during training. They recognize the usual setups and punchlines. They can even explain why something might be funny, but it feels like they’re mostly repeating patterns instead of actually “getting” the joke. I know this is obvious but that leads me to the actual humor part.

I tried an experiment to test that. I gave the model a few jokes that I personally find funny, they weren’t the usual dad jokes or puns, and asked it to explain them. It didn’t really seem to understand why they were funny, so I added my own explanation and then asked it to make new jokes in the same style. What it came up with kind of looked like my sense of humor, but it still felt off. Like it was following the rules but didn’t have any real spark behind it.

My guess is that it’s copying the structure of the humor but not the feeling. That makes sense, since it doesn’t really “understand” things like people do. It just works off patterns it’s learned from text.

I guess what I’m trying to figure out is how I should think about this. Am I understanding it right, or am I missing something important about how these models handle humor?

In short, my point is that it’s obvious that LLMs aren’t understanding like humans are, everyone on this sub knows that it’s just semantic understanding through multidimensional space. So while it can mimic jokes it’s seen or produce common answers to jokes it’s seen, (from my limited tests), it cannot produce jokes that make me laugh if we give it examples of what I find funny, it mostly takes the examples and produces the underlying structure of the text but the actual essence of what makes it funny disappears. This only happens when I explicitly have it look at the examples I like, and have it create novel humor and my expectation was some form of understanding of why I think it was funny, but it failed. Im not referring to when I make a joke and say it’s funny and then I tell it to disregard the structure and naturally generate humor without pattern, pseudoscience but that seems to work a bit better