“GPT-3 Creative Fiction § Pun Explanations”, Gwern2020-06-19 (, , , , )⁠:

Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.

A followup to the Shoggoth Cat dialogue I did for Abram Demski to further probe what exactly GPT-3 does or does not understand about puns & humor; the inability to correctly explain puns despite 3 examples, and the nonsense ‘puns’+‘pun interpretations’ it generates on its own (even for real jokes which are memorized), show that the inability is fundamental.

Because there is “one right answer” to why the pun works, I treat it as a Q&A dialogue, going up to BO=20/temp=1 to try to get the maximally-likely response, which doesn’t help much—the answers are still non sequiturs.