Jokes in DALL-E
As a data governance expert and a nerd, I’ve started working on a repository of data governance humor. Recently, as a fun little project, I’ve started to try to get ChatGPT (DALL-E) to illustrate some jokes. It’s been a journey that has taught me some things about humor and AI.
The joke I’m working on is: Why did the data steward go to therapy? Because he had too many unresolved issues!
If you just ask ChatGPT to illustrate this joke, you get something like this:
First of all, you can see that there are some words that are misspelled. I don’t know why this happens, but ChatGPT insists on using a lot of words in its illustrations and many of them are spelled slightly wrong. Look for this in little infographics you find in articles. If you see things like “databose” or “quilty” as labels on books or files, it was made with DALL-E.
But more importantly, it doesn’t really capture the humor of the joke. Like sure it’s a data steward in therapy, but why is that funny? The original joke isn’t knee-slappingly hilarious, but there is something to it. And that something isn’t captured by the picture.
As a data person, I don’t think much about what makes jokes funny, but I had to if I wanted to get a good AI generated joke picture. I worked out that the funny part of this joke is the double meaning of the word “issues”. The therapist thinks that she’s helping the data steward with something he’s struggling with mentally, but the data steward is just bringing his extra work to therapy. The joke lies with the steward not being stressed or overwhelmed with work (normal things for a therapist to help with), but just using the therapist to take some work off his plate.
I explained this to DALL-E and eventually got the below picture:
It has no words. It’s just a neutral looking businessperson (the term data steward kept getting me a guy with a t-shirt that said ‘data steward’) who is discussing work with a confused looking therapist. I don’t think this is the best picture, but it took me a couple hours and I was very proud of it. Any suggestions for improvement?