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,《纽约客》的资深漫画编辑鲍勃•曼科夫(Bob Mankoff)把一幅插画——修车厂里的“小丑车”,发动机的位置换成了三名小丑和一位商人——喂给几个大型语言模型,让它们解释笑点。一个接一个,模型都把幽默归因于小丑;直到最后,才有一个答对了:笑点在那位商人——在一个本已自洽而奇幻的场景中,他显得格格不入。“我在引擎盖下发现了点严肃的东西。”那一周《纽约客》漫画配文大赛的获奖作品如此写道。