One day, the longtime New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff fed an illustration — a clown car at the repair shop, with three clowns and a businessman in place of the engine — to several large language models and asked them to explain the joke. One after the other, the models misattributed the humour to the clowns, but finally, one got it: the joke was the businessman, out of place in an otherwise coherent, fantastical scene. “I found something serious under the hood,” went that week’s winning entry to the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.
有一天，《紐約客》的資深漫畫編輯鮑勃?曼科夫(Bob Mankoff)把一幅插畫——修車廠里的“小丑車”，發(fā)動機的位置換成了三名小丑和一位商人——喂給幾個大型語言模型，讓它們解釋笑點。一個接一個，模型都把幽默歸因于小丑；直到最后，才有一個答對了：笑點在那位商人——在一個本已自洽而奇幻的場景中，他顯得格格不入。“我在引擎蓋下發(fā)現了點嚴肅的東西。”那一周《紐約客》漫畫配文大賽的獲獎作品如此寫道。