mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ChatGPT is fun, but it is not funny! Humor is still challenging Large Language Models

arXiv 2306.04563 ↗First posted 7 Jun 2023cs.AI cs.CL cs.HCcited by 23

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Abstract (arXiv)

Humor is a central aspect of human communication that has not been solved for artificial agents so far. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly able to capture implicit and contextual information. Especially, OpenAI's ChatGPT recently gained immense public attention. The GPT3-based model almost seems to communicate on a human level and can even tell jokes. Humor is an essential component of human communication. But is ChatGPT really funny? We put ChatGPT's sense of humor to the test. In a series of exploratory experiments around jokes, i.e., generation, explanation, and detection, we seek to understand ChatGPT's capability to grasp and reproduce human humor. Since the model itself is not accessible, we applied prompt-based experiments. Our empirical evidence indicates that jokes are not hard-coded but mostly also not newly generated by the model. Over 90% of 1008 generated jokes were the same 25 Jokes. The system accurately explains valid jokes but also comes up with fictional explanations for invalid jokes. Joke-typical characteristics can mislead ChatGPT in the classification of jokes. ChatGPT has not solved computational humor yet but it can be a big leap toward "funny" machines.

Key facts. Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 12 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2023.

Builds on

12 of 59 references.

References · 12

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
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  3. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  4. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
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  7. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
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  9. 2021Large Pre-trained Language Models Contain Human-like Biases of What is Right and Wrong to Docited by 178
  10. 2019Humor Detection: A Transformer Gets the Last Laughcited by 46
  11. 2020Federated Learning for Personalized Humor Recognitioncited by 6
  12. 2021DeHumor: Visual Analytics for Decomposing Humorcited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 8; 2024: 7; 2025: 4; 2026: 4.

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  1. 2023A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Modelscited by 1,227
  2. 2023SteerLM: Attribute Conditioned SFT as an (User-Steerable) Alternative to RLHFcited by 107
  3. 2023Generative Language Models Exhibit Social Identity Biasescited by 107
  4. 2023A Confederacy of Models: a Comprehensive Evaluation of LLMs on Creative Writingcited by 98
  5. 2023GPTEval: A Survey on Assessments of ChatGPT and GPT-4cited by 73
  6. 2025Evaluating the Diversity and Quality of LLM Generated Contentcited by 51
  7. 2023Aligning Large Language Models with Human: A Surveycited by 31
  8. 2023Probing the Creativity of Large Language Models: Can models produce divergent semantic association?cited by 31
  9. 2024Humor in AI: Massive Scale Crowd-Sourced Preferences and Benchmarks for Cartoon Captioningcited by 18
  10. 2024Do Large Language Models Understand Conversational Implicature -- A case study with a chinese sitcomcited by 15
  11. 2024Cracking the Code of Juxtaposition: Can AI Models Understand the Humorous Contradictionscited by 11
  12. 2023Prompting a Large Language Model to Generate Diverse Motivational Messages: A Comparison with Human-Written Messagescited by 10
11 more
  1. 2024Large Models of What? Mistaking Engineering Achievements for Human Linguistic Agencycited by 9
  2. 2025Diversity-Enhanced Reasoning for Subjective Questionscited by 9
  3. 2025When 'YES' Meets 'BUT': Can Large Models Comprehend Contradictory Humor Through Comparative Reasoning?cited by 5
  4. 2026On the Wings of Imagination: Conflicting Script-based Multi-role Framework for Humor Caption Generationcited by 3
  5. 2024The Unlikely Duel: Evaluating Creative Writing in LLMs through a Unique Scenariocited by 2
  6. 2024Incorporating Different Verbal Cues to Improve Text-Based Computer-Delivered Health Messagingcited by 0
  7. 2024A Survey on the Real Power of ChatGPTcited by 0
  8. 2025JaccDiv: A Metric and Benchmark for Quantifying Diversity of Generated Marketing Text in the Music Industrycited by 0
  9. 2026"Not Human, Funnier": How Machine Identity Shapes Humor Perception in Online AI Stand-up Comedycited by 0
  10. 2026Reasoning or Memorization: Can LLMs Understand and Generate Chinese Xiehouyu Riddles?cited by 0
  11. 2026CaRGo-T: Causal Reasoning Graph-of-Thought improves Multimodal Humor Comprehensioncited by 0