Can AI ever be funny? Some comedians embrace AI tools but they’re still running the show

By MATT O BRIEN A baby and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio Welcome to the talking baby podcast says the infant wearing headphones and sounding like a deep-voiced radio broadcaster On at present s episode we ll be talking to the weird-looking person who lives at my house So begins a series of humorous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that s attracted millions of views on social media They re a nod to the movie Look Who s Talking but produced in a matter of hours and without a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget Related Articles Elizabeth Holmes Theranos fraudster indicates damning evidence against her was false claim Scrutiny Moss Landing battery fire dumped pounds of toxic metals into wildlife-rich marshes Cyber Monday spending pace lags Black Friday for second year Amazon rushes out latest AI chip to take on Nvidia Google OpenAI s Altman urges code red ChatGPT push Information says AI helped do all of that but it didn t craft the punch lines It s a relief to comedian Jon Lajoie who made the videos that AI chatbots just aren t inherently funny It can t write comedy revealed Lajoie It can t do any of that For now at least they won t take his job Lajoie s viral videos have gained him attention as an AI-adopting entertainer that s he s not entirely settled with as he grapples with what all this means for the future of his very human craft of making people laugh King Willonius is not feeling so cautious His first big hit was an AI-generated song called BBL Drizzy that made fun of rapper Drake during the height of his 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 Willonius explained I try to find out OK what s my comedic angle on this particular topic And then I ll generate a video from that He 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 The key he says is to keep iterating But he wouldn t just ask it for a joke Willonius says largest part chatbot-generated comedy lacks the nuances or complexities that it takes for jokes to really land A scholar of comedy Michelle Robinson revealed a lot of the stuff that I ve seen AI produce is corny as hell It does seem fluent in the basic grammar of jokes but sometimes they re slightly off revealed Robinson a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill They may be moderately funny but I think they re really missing an pivotal element of what makes us laugh What are they missing She s not totally sure except that preponderance 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 Caleb Warren a professor who studies marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona declared that leaves comedy writers with an opportunity to make use of tools that can t absolutely outsource their skills The ideas that are driving the humor are coming from the human comedian but the AI tools can help them execute and illustrate them Warren revealed Willonius was a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with AI during Hollywood s actor and writer strikes in I leaned all the way into AI because I didn t know what else to do with my free time he disclosed I was doing everything I could to try to break into Hollywood And once the writers strike happened that kind of shut that down I started to learn these AI tools and get really good at them and started to cultivate an audience While Willonius saw an opening the rise of generative AI has stoked division and posed challenges to other professional comedians Sarah Silverman joined book authors in suing leading chatbot makers alleging they infringed the copyright of her The Bedwetter memoir The daughter of the late Robin Williams called it gross and maddening when users of OpenAI s AI video generator Sora conjured up realistic deepfakes of the beloved actor to churn out what she described as horrible TikTok slop puppeteering You re not making art you re making disgusting overprocessed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings out of the history of art and music and then shoving them down someone else s throat hoping they ll give you a little thumbs-up and like it Zelda Williams wrote in October And the estate of legendary comic George Carlin last year settled a lawsuit against podcasters who purportedly cloned his voice to make a fake hourslong comedy special Comics have also relished mocking AI tools A new South Park episode called Sora Not Sorry had a bumbling police detective investigate a scourge of fake videos Lajoie known for his work on the TV series The League and comic songs on YouTube tried to see what would happen if he solicited ChatGPT to help craft a bizarre movie script idea He disclosed it gave him something super boring about grandma s dentures and a talking raccoon That level of human creativity it can t mimic yet or at least maybe I m not great at prompting he noted Instead he identified it useful to cheaply animate ideas he would otherwise never have pursued such as the talking baby birds wearing jeans or a podcasting Jesus Christ interviewing an Easter Bunny who s never heard of him The prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invited Lajoie and Willonius to exhibit their video creations this fall at a new AI gallery space in Manhattan part of a promotion of AI creativity tool startups that the firm invests in Willonius obliged Lajoie ended up bowing out after an interview with The Associated Press in which he voiced doubts about what he described as AI s Napster phase The music-sharing website shuttered in the early s after the record industry and rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations The assets firm s co-founder Marc Andreessen has been bullish about AI s feasible to bring new life into filmmaking and comedy On a November podcast he blamed Hollywood opposition to its adoption on woke activists who have picked up AI as the new thing they re going to agitate about He compared it to resistance to computer graphics in movies before they became commonplace Lajoie explained he shared his early AI video experiments with a inadequate friends who are anti-AI real real anti-AI and they were surprised by how well the sketches retained Lajoie s own comedic voice He insists he s no AI expert just a creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other But even editing the sketches requires understanding comedic timing and he has no interest in ceding that part to a machine The thing with comedy is it s so related to performance delivery and point of view Lajoie commented Do AIs have a point of view They can grab a limited points of view from different people And when it does have a point of view I think that s when we all should be afraid for all of the reasons that the Terminator has taught us he noted