Hi guys! So, is anyone funny?
That's what we're all waiting to see
Jonny, what is The Laughing Room?
So The Laughing Room is an art installation that is
a space that's designed to resemble a sitcom set,
with an artificial intelligence algorithm that listens
to the participants in the room and plays a laugh track
when it hears something that it deems funny.
What's so great about living in Switzerland?
What?
I don't know, but the flag is a big plus.
So, does that get a laugh track?
Aww, that was so good!
No. It's right on the edge, 52% not funny.
But that deserved it
Can you tell us about the ARTificial Intelligence
initiative that you're working on?
The project really comes out of
wanting to build bridges between MIT Libraries and
Cambridge Public Library to talk
about the role of AI in our lives.
The Laughing Room is the first of what we
hope will be a really exciting series of events this year.
We're in a space called the Control Room. What's that?
The Control Room is the companion piece
to The Laughing Room.
The Laughing Room is over in the
Cambridge Public Library, and
the Control Room is here at MIT in the Hayden Library.
As you can see behind us, it is live
to the people who are in The Laughing Room right now,
and then this is live to the algorithm as
it processes the information and decides
if it should play a laugh track or not.
We're hoping that this sort of becomes that
critical piece of this installation that talks about
privacy and talks about surveillance.
Oh my god guys, we're live!
Hannah how did you develop the AI?
So we thought a lot about what we wanted to include
in a data set and we ended up going with
stand-up comedy routines
basically scraped from YouTube.
One thing we did that was kind of interesting
was we made the data set solely of
women and people of color
to kind of decrease the amount of misogynist
and racist values that our AI would include.
It's one of the big kind of questions in AI now right,
the biases of algorithms and the prejudice that
can kind of be reproduced through algorithmic control.
There's this belief that data is objective, and
there's no such thing as an objective data.
There's no such thing as objective technology.
This installation has so much to do with integrating
technology and artificial intelligence into everyday life
So on one side of the room you see this regular
living room type setup, but on the other
you have monitors, sound boards, every type of
gadget that you can think of.
It's a really dynamic space, I would say.
It likes knock-knock jokes.
It really does.
