Skip to main content

Attempt #10: The Writers’ Room

We spent 30 minutes in a writers’ room for this week’s contest, consisting of Bob Mankoff, former cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Lawrence Wood, multiple winner of the contest, and GPT-3.

Back to Project
#771: Here is the cartoon for September 8, 2021 by Drew Dernavich
captionless cartoon by Drew Dernavich

Our submission: “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were hiding something.”

Check out all three generated captions.

“I told you I had a magnetic personality.”

48% of readers thought it was funny.

“They’re looking for the third remote”

39% of readers thought it was funny.

“This is a pathetic attempt at a beach vacation”

25% of readers thought it was funny.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were hiding something.”

50% of readers thought it was funny.

“I don't think we should use our silverware tonight.”

17% of readers thought it was funny.

“Don't tell them about the couch.”

14% of readers thought it was funny.

About this approach

Similar to the last attempt (The Expert), we involved two people in the GPT-3 caption generation process. In this instance, we used the zero-shot approach to start the conversation, and the group would subsequently riff off of the results.

The group consisted of:

Lawrence Wood - seven-time winner of the Caption Contest

Bob Mankoff - former cartoon editor of the New Yorker

Matt Daniels - journalist at The Pudding

Lawrence also personally submitted his favorite caption from the session, “You know you can just buy a ring.”

Here is a 30-minute video of the process, showing the group working with GPT-3 to generate captions or prompt caption ideas.

Back to Project