Witscript 2: A System for Generating Improvised Jokes Without Wordplay

Abstract: A previous paper presented Witscript, a system for generating conversational jokes that rely on wordplay. This paper extends that work by presenting Witscript 2, which uses a LLM to generate conversational jokes that rely on common sense instead of wordplay. Like Witscript, Witscript 2 is based on joke-writing algorithms created by an expert comedy writer. Human evaluators judged Witscript 2's responses to input sentences to be jokes 46% of the time, compared to 70% of the time for human-written responses. This is evidence that Witscript 2 represents another step toward giving a chatbot a humanlike sense of humor.