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Touhou Project creator ZUN says AI can never beat human creativity. “We’re all just too poisoned by capitalism.” - AUTOMATON WEST In a recent live broadcast on YouTube, Touhou Project creator ZUN shared his opinion on AI-generated music and the human creative spirit.

Touhou Project creator ZUN says AI can never beat human creativity. “We’re all just too poisoned by capitalism.”
automaton-media.com/en/news/touh...

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a couple of anime girls hugging each other with a fence in the background ALT: a couple of anime girls hugging each other with a fence in the background

hugging every mutual very tightly~...

BIG CHIKA

Somewhere, in a karaoke room right now, somebody is singing “Tequila,” “Do the Hustle,” or “Wipeout,” with the passion of a professional singer. ☺️

Everyday you wake up, you're continuing to write a story without knowing the ending. I think that's the joy of life at the end of the day ❤️

Touhou Fan Game Jam 16 starts in a month on October 23rd at 12:00 PM PST. Teams will have 72 hours to make a game based around a theme.

The theme for this jam is: Tailor-Made!

Links to the jam itself and the Discord (which has channels for team-forming) can be found below!

#Touhou #TouhouJam

This makes sense because slice-of-life introduces novel experiences where there’s not always the threat of a negative outcome, but a novel experience full of surprise, and we delight in the characters’ reactions.
So that old advice of, “When in doubt, introduce a gun”? Introduce *anything*! 😋

What Is Narrative Suspense? Evidence from Production Studies Suspense is an important aesthetic feature of narrative media across different genres. Literary theory is concerned with elucidating the concept of suspense as applied to narrative literature. If lite...

Now that I got a microsecond to breathe, read an interesting study on studies on suspense: suspense in stories seems to be more about danger, mystery, and importance of events rather than potential for positive of negative outcomes. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Many theories of comedy say the unexpected twist of the punchline creates the laugh. Shock comics get laughs because of how unexpected the shock is, even if it lacks a proper punchline. A better comedian creates laughs through puns, clever incongruities, script overlaps, etc.

The big reason actual comedians dislike these folks is that they don’t really tell “jokes.”
Compare the two:
Comic A: What is up with [slur]? They’re always [stereotype]!
Comic B: Did you know jalapeños are considered berries? So, y’know, be careful if you ever ask me to make you a fruit smoothie.

Getting back into comedy, I’m reminded that the recent trend of “edgy comics for edginess’s sake” isn’t new, where punchlines are replaced with shock and crudeness.
Andrew Dice Clay and his ilk were an example of the last generation of these, and it didn’t last. Neither will this generation’s.

First Impressions - Delta Force 2025: Delta Force used to be one of the early ultra-real shooters akin to Operation Flashpoint or Ghost Recon. You’d think with new games like Arma, Insurgency, or Ready Or Not, they’d hit it out of the park. Instead, it’s just a poor Battlefield 2042 clone. 😞

I wrote that into one of my comedy shows, funnily enough. 😋

12 trash bags and a ton of cleaning supplies later, I’m done.
After talking it over with some buddies, turns out losing a roommate may have affected me more than I thought.
Moral of the story: IRL social support is super important, more so than you’d think.

I finally figured out the secret to keeping a clean house.
Keep inviting people over until you start feeling guilty about how messy it is. 🙂‍↕️

There’s one more not included, only implied, in Raskin’s theory: Context, or how it all fits together.
While all of an LLM AI’s joke outputs are painfully unfunny, a performance that makes them the butt of a joke can turn them into something so unfunny that they become funny.
So, Humans: 7, AI: 0. 😏

So that makes Humans: 6, LLM AI: 0.
This study on jokes is also why LLM’s can’t tell stories and why its creative writing output is so awful: creative writing all involves playing with language in ways AI cannot for a very, VERY long time.
Once again, I remind everyone: your creative tasks are safe.

Lastly, there’s Language, the individual words, and if we learned anything from George Carlin to Steven Wright to Patton Oswalt, playing with words is something comedians specialize in.
And despite scraping terabytes of data, quite a bit of which violate copyright laws, LLM’s somehow don’t.

Thanks to an LLM AI’s stubborn architecture, it has very little wiggle room to vary its joke strategies. It cannot do the faux mistake of Punchline A or subtle sarcasm of Punchline B.
It can only do, “I take antidepressants like lifesavers—now my psychiatrist is judging me.”

Next, Narrative Strategy has to do with ordering/meaning.
Compare the two versions of a joke by Miguel Porfirio:
Setup: “Anti-depressents are lifesavers!”
Punchline A: “Wait, I mean I’ve been taking anti-depressants like lifesavers!”
Punchline B: “Because I’m devouring them like candy!”

Next is Target, the butt of the joke, subject of praise, or simply point of weirdness. Only humans can explore this range of possibilities.
If you haven’t noticed, LLM AI can only do, “My ____ is judging me,” “jokes.” It can’t do the nuance of puns or positive incongruencies.

But LLM AI cannot utilize all these props because it cannot think semantically: it just autocompletes the sentence via the shortest possible route, resulting in, “I played ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ 27 times in a row on a diner jukebox—now everyone’s questioning my musical tastes.”
Seeing a pattern?

Next is Situation: a good joke uses all of its props in the same way a good fight scene uses its arena.
Take John Mulaney’s routine about endlessly repeating “What’s New Pussycat?” on a diner jukebox, describing a man pounding a table in rage, “And silverware flied everywhere, and it was FANTASTIC!”

Once again, the limited structure of LLM AI cannot compete with human intuition. While humans can vary their structure, AI can only do a strict setup-punchline order, often separated by dashes.
The result?
“I went to a Japanese restaurant—now I wonder of the cook is questioning my health choices.”
😑

The next layer is the Logical Mechanism: is it a riddle (“I went to that place where they cook the stuff in front of you. What’s it called? Oh yeah! Meth!”), a pun (“I sprayed some spot remover on my dog, now he’s gone.”), a story (“‘Are you Ron ‘Tater Salad’ White?’”), etc.?

The architecture of LLM AI doesn’t allow for script opposition because it’s nothing more than a fancy autocomplete. It’s also why AI can’t write narratives, which rely on script violations.
As a result, AI could take Mitch’s setup and write, “I had an ant farm—now I think my ants are judging me.” 😒

The first layer of a joke is Script Opposition. If you’re familiar with Incongruity theory or Benign Violation theory, then you’d know a joke happens when two seemingly opposite ideas fit together. For example, Mitch Hedberg’s, “I had an ant farm, but they didn’t grow shit!”

If you want scientific proof AI cannot write a joke if its life depended on it, look no further than Viktor Raskin, whose ideas helped influence standup comedy teacher Greg Dean.
According to Raskin, there are 6 factors that determine a joke’s effectiveness: all six of which an AI cannot pull off. 🧵

The Touhou Popularity poll is now open! You can start putting your vote downs by accessing the site linked below! Be sure to turn on the page translation! Reminder that your 1st vote is worth 3 points and your 2nd vote is worth 2 points this year!

toho-vote.info/vote