Truman Capote, AI, and Comedy

I recently reread Truman Capote's La Côte Basque from my Great Esquire Fiction book and it prompted my research into this story, which prompted this post on Artificial Intelligence and Comedy.

In researching this story and Capote, google kept popping up things about Capote's IQ. After I finished my research of this story (and how it basically ruined Capote's life and resulted in his slow suicide via drugs and alcohol) I went back to the Capote IQ.

Now the internet isn't exactly the place for unequivocal truth, but let's say that Capote's "internet" IQ of 215 is close to the truth. 

Now we know that AI can now write novels and poetry and there is cause to believe it can be "good" or "decent" writing. 

Because AI is a matter of pattern recognition. Recognize enough patterns and you can create, be it skyscrapers or stories. 

This is a crucial point. 

So I thought of comedy. If AI can recognize the parts/patterns of a joke, (set-up, punch line, etc.), it can in theory, create comedy.

So in time we can expect computers to be comedians?

Naw.

Part of what computers and AI can't access or pattern recognize, is feelings. Humans have feelings. And pain. Certainly what drove part of Richard Pryor's comedy was pain. Part of what drove George Carlin's comedy was anger.

Can computers pattern recognize their way to pain or anger?

In my estimation, no.

Pain and anger, (and I say this in my 51st year on the planet, and in therapy), require a biography, a full narrative to draw from.

Computers and AI don't have a past, replete with feelings and memories.

Can computers and AI pattern recognize their way to feelings and memories?

You can see where this is going. An infinite regress, a homonculus with a homonculus with a...

Kurzweil is probably correct about the future and the singularity may be near. And he's probably correct that we shouldn't fear it or the algorithms.

Probably.

I have always been more afraid of humans than anything else, being a student of history.

I certainly do not fear robots and AI creating anything artistic that will rival what humans can do. 

Capote, IQ of 215 and all, was, per Nietzsche, human, all too human, and imperfect and flawed and capable of sadness and regret and shame, in incredible proportions.

Ah feelings, nothing more than feelings.
Trying to forget my feelings...

AI can't feel or forget.

Our (human) art is safe.

Just not from humans.

Get it?

Stupid copywriting, I didn't want to do it anyway

I recently finished Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky and was taken aback at how he points out what socioeconomic status and early trauma can do to a person. 

Namely, me.

And here I sit, in a nice house, reading a book for a copywriting class I get to take...for free when a certain passage hits me and I realize just how correct Sapolsky is.

The book for the copywriting class is The Well Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less, by Peter Bowerman.

The chapter is Nuts and Bolts and the Passage is The Ebb and Flow of Work, where he writes:

"...in most cases, human nature usually prevails: we market a bunch, get work, stop marketing, only to resume after the job's done. The result? Alternating periods of being swamped and dead in the water. C'est la vie..."

And in 4 sentences I know I can't be a freelance copywriter.

(Disclosure: I was not planning on being a freelance copywriter or a non-freelance copywriter. I'm taking a class to learn some stuff.)

But the thought of not having a job and not having an income, meager it may be, is too anxiety provoking to give this career a second thought. 

Growing up with 8 people in a 2 bedroom home that could have six inches of water in the basement means I have to keep my world small and routine and perhaps the most important part of that routine is money (again meager) coming in.

I can't ebb and flow with money, I can't C'est la vie. I won't make it.

Why?

Socioeconomic status and trauma.

We are thrown into the world, with no choice of where we land or into which hands and homes. 

I have a choice now but it is limited. Free will is limited at best, an illusion at worst. 

Stupid copywriting, I didn't want to do it anyway.