Back in 2019, when AI was safely in the realm of science fiction and GPT-2 was still several months from release, a group of researchers submitted a paper to that summer’s annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The paper “Towards Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (An Obviously Perfect Paper)” described a proposal for a database of annotated examples of sarcasm in speech, drawn from popular TV shows including Friends and The Big Bang Theory. The idea was that the database—dub...