Weighing In on AI's Comedy Chops: 'Corny as Hell'

A baby and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio. "Welcome to the talking baby podcast," says the infant, sounding like a deep-voiced radio broadcaster. So begins a series of humorous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that's attracted millions of views on social media, per the AP. They're a nod to the 1989 movie Look Who's Talking, but they're produced in a matter of hours and without a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget. AI helped do all of that, but it didn't craft the punch lines—a relief to comedian Jon Lajoie, who made the videos and says that AI chatbots just aren't "inherently funny." "It can't write comedy," said Lajoie.

Lajoie's viral videos have gained him attention as an AI-adopting entertainer that's he's not entirely comfortable with as he grapples with what all this means for the future of his human craft of making people laugh. Willonius Hatcher, aka King Willonius, on the other hand, isn't feeling as cautious. His first big hit was an AI-generated song called "BBL Drizzy" that made fun of Drake during the height of the rapper's feud with Kendrick Lamar. He's since moved into making AI video parodies like "I'm McLovin It (Popeye's Diss Song)" and "I Want My Barrel Back (Cracker Barrel Song)." "It's very similar to somebody who's writing for the Onion or SNL," Hatcher said.

Hatcher starts with writing his own notes on an idea, then refines it with a chatbot and puts that language—known as a prompt—into AI tools that can generate imagery, video, music, and voices. But he wouldn't just ask it for a joke: Hatcher says most chatbot-generated comedy lacks the "nuances or complexities that it takes for jokes to really land." A lot of the stuff that I've seen AI produce is corny as hell," said Michelle Robinson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "It does seem fluent in the basic grammar of jokes, but sometimes they're slightly off. ... They're really missing an important element of what makes us laugh."

So what is that missing factor? Robinson isn't totally sure, except that most good jokes are a little edgy or dangerous, and chatbots can't seem to calibrate "whatever provocation is in the joke to the moment that we're living in." "The thing with comedy is it's so related to performance, delivery, and point of view," Lajoie noted. "Do AIs have a point of view? They can grab a few points of view from different people." Ultimately, Lajoie added, when the bots do develop a POV, "that's when we all should be afraid for all of the reasons that the Terminator has taught us." More here.