By Tracey Follows

The Mona Lisa and Albert Einstein make a little joke about what the letters M.I.T. stand for. It’s not what you think, it’s Make It Tougher, apparently. Such is the humor between AI-generated characters on screen that welcomed the online and in-person audience to an event entitled, ‘Virtual Beings and Being Virtual’ organized by MIT Media Lab with NTT Data.

Perhaps the joke isn’t that bad once you consider that these on-screen characters came about via GPT-3 and were programmed from the instruction: create a conversation between Mona Lisa and Einstein where they make a joke about MIT. And that’s what we see and hear from the two famous characters online as AI fills the air with dialogue and the characters’ mouths and heads move on the screen.