Looking for the perfect night out? There’s an AI for that – no joke

We spend a large portion of our day making decisions – what to wear, what to eat, who to spend time with. But what if we were able to assign some of these choices to AI?

Visitors to this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival will have a new and improved way to decide which shows to watch, thanks to a new artificial intelligence tool that’s available on the event’s website.

Dylan Cole from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Louise Compagnone from Datacom. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Users can enter their preferences into the “Funny Finder”, such as availability, interests and comedic styles, to receive tailored show recommendations.

Seeking a female performer who specialises in musical comedy? Give Stephanie Broadbridge’s show a try. How about improvisational comedy that young people can enjoy? Steen Raskopolous seems a good bet.

Developed by IT company Datacom in partnership with the festival, the AI assistant matches user preferences with shows they might be interested in, and offers a short synopsis.

“If you think about the kind of traditional way of finding comedy, you either would have to scroll through the program, or you might have a billion browsers open,” says Louise Compagnone, AI director at Datacom. “The Funny Finder is actually a way of beelining that, so you can instantly ask many things at once.”

Compagnone says scheduling is a key feature of the program. It allows users to identify an interesting performance at a nearby venue at short notice – especially useful for those who might want to catch a second gig, or have a laugh after dinner.

The program combines information from the comedy festival website with large language model Chat GPT-4o to process contextual prompts. No data from users is collected or stored by Datacom.

Like many AI programs, there are hiccups. When this masthead asked the Funny Finder to display shows on any given date, it was met with an error. The webpage warns of this possibility – saying that it is “still learning and might sometimes get things wrong.” It asks users to be patient as it improves.

But when working as intended, Melbourne International Comedy Festival executive director Dylan Cole says Funny Finder will enable festival-goers to find emerging artists on the event’s ever-growing schedule because it shows no bias towards the more popular acts. This year’s program will feature 685 shows from more than 1800 artists.

“We feel like it’s a first,” Cole says. “No arts festival or arts company has done this before. It [overcomes] our challenge of navigating what is sometimes an overwhelming program.”

Dr Thomas Saltsman, professor of social psychology at the University of Buffalo’s Singapore campus, says Funny Finder could prevent festival goers from experiencing “choice overload”.

“We like having access to all those options ... but when we get there, to have to actually choose, it can be a bit paralysing, it can be slightly overwhelming, and people become less likely to actually make a choice,” Saltsman says.

When they make a choice, people tend to experience greater regret and dissatisfaction, he says. Reassigning the task could thus be beneficial.

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival features close to 700 shows a year.Credit: Nick Robertson

“If the program starts choosing for us, then it takes away this onerous burden of having to choose ... and these things can optimise these situations for us, which is wonderful and definitely time saving,” Saltsman says.

Compagnone sees a future where such a tool could help elsewhere, for example, in creating a dinner shopping list and helping you order groceries online.

“It’s just a new way of doing things ... It’s just giving another option,” Compagnone says. “In some ways, you can think about it as outsourcing your admin to your little AI intern, and then spending time doing the stuff that you like.

“We think that it could be applied to almost anything … the more information something has, the better … It just can help you to find the needle in the haystack, without you doing the heavy lifting.”

But Saltsman stresses that AI tools are far from perfect. For instance, they could threaten some of our human ability to make independent decisions.

“I think if it becomes increasingly easy to rely on algorithms to make choices for us, then we’re not flexing those decision-making muscles,” he says. “And I do fear that we won’t find value in autonomy any more.”

Instead, Saltsman recommends using AI programs as one option among a range of decision-making devices – to “use it as a tool, not a rule” – both in the context of the festival and around other decision-making.

“With a lot of these festivals, there’s so much content … it would be really onerous to go through and find all the optimal things,” Saltsman says. “This could certainly be a helpful tool … not as a way to take away any choice or autonomy, but using it as a guide.”

Things could be suggested to us, and the suggestions could be good, he says. “But not even the algorithm is going to be able to predict all the possible factors that could shape your enjoyment of something.”

The 2025 edition of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival runs from March 26 to April 20. Tickets are available from the festival website.

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