[Air-L] New article about AI & Jewish Humor

[Aram Sinnreich]

Fellow AoIRistas:

I have a new article out in First Monday with Nathaniel Laywine and Victoria Simon, which we recently discussed at an ICA postconference at QUT (thanks to Jean and Ariadna for hosting).

The article is titled " Laughing to keep from [user input undefined]: ChatGPT, Jewish humor, and cultural erasure,” and the title pretty much tells you what it’s about. 

Here’s the full abstract:
This paper uses the embodied, Jewish identities of its three authors, and the experimental methodology of kibbitzing as a form of collective inquiry and self-reflexive praxis in order to demonstrate the limitations of chatbots to produce humorous narratives from an explicitly Jewish epistemology. By contrasting the affordances of large language models (LLMs) and their associated chatbots with the context-based logics of Jewish joke craft and storytelling, this article goes on to demonstrate the risk of cultural erasure that is posed by the positivist, denotative meanings associated with ChatGPT’s attempts at producing jokes for, or about, Jews.

You can read the whole thing for free (FM is an open access journal) here: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13375

Thanks!

Aram