Since 2005, the back page of the New Yorker has usually featured a wordless, black-and-white cartoon, and the funniest reader-submitted caption gets published in a following issue. The magazine’s caption contest has become a fan favorite over the last decade, and the cartoon department receives some 5,000 entries each week. This has become an overwhelming number of jokes to sift through—particularly for Bob Mankoff’s assistant. The 71-year-old cartoon editor for the New Yorker says the average tenure of his assistants is barely a couple of years because he keeps burning them out. “The process of looking at 5,000 caption entries a week usually destroys their mind in about two years, and then I get a new one,” Mankoff says. “It's a little bit daunting. It's like going snow blind; you go humor blind.”
Soon, Mankoff’s assistants could get relief in the form of an assistant of their own: an artificial intelligence system with a sense of humor. Mankoff collaborated with researchers at Microsoft on an artificial intelligence project that aims to teach a computer what’s funny. They’re feeding an archive of New Yorker cartoons and caption-contest entries into AI software to give machines some understanding of humor (the New Yorker’s brand of humor, at least). A Microsoft researcher plans to present the findings onstage on Aug. 13 at the KDD data conference in Sydney.
