No soap radio: AI bots don’t get puns, but pretend they do

There is a very old practical joke where the prankster tells a joke with a nonsensical punchline, “no soap – radio,” no matter the setup, to one or more people in on the joke. A lone uninformed victim will often laugh along, despite not getting the joke. It turns out LLMs do the same thing with puns.

At first glance, large language models like ChatGPT se…