Pranked by AI? Elva Etienne/Getty

Need inspiration for a good April Fool’s prank? Artificially intelligent help is at hand. Janelle Shane collected practical jokes from online lists, fed them into a neural network and asked it to invent new ones. The results are highly original pranks that your victims will never see coming. Some seem to make sense:

1. Place a pair of pants and shoes in your ice dispenser.

2. Put marbles in the hand soap dispenser.


3. Putting googly eyes on someone’s computer mouse so that it won’t work.

4. Place a pair of pants and shoes in Easter egg foils.

5. Hide all of the entrance to your office building if it only has one entrance.

6. Put food colouring in the mailbox.

But others may be a little trickier to put into practice:

7. Glue all the eggs in the hubcaps of someone’s computer.

8. A meat and mashed potato sundae makes for quite the hand soap dispenser.

9. Put a glow stick in a toilet paper into the toe of your kid’s shoes.

10. Take the door knob off your kid’s shoes.

11. Rearrange somebody while pretending to pee.

12. If you rip up a toilet paper roll, then leave them a ransom note.

13. Hide an alarm clock in someone’s keyboard who isn’t a very good typist.

Neural networks are a form of machine learning program that can extract rules from a large dataset to create new examples of the same format, with little or no input from humans. Like many other attempts at AI-generated humour, this one succeeds at producing funny results, but that’s mainly because the jokes are so nonsensical and unlike what a human would think of.

Shane previously trained a neural network to tell knock-knock jokes, but it became fixated on a specific line of humour: the cow with no lips joke. Having learned a joke about a cow with no lips that makes “oo” sounds, the AI repeatedly invented more jokes with “oo” sounds in the punchline.

Knock Knock

Who’s There?

Woon

Wood who?

Wow wo no tho out on to too too ooo ooo oooo ooo oou tou pol she tho tou!

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