by Debbie Burke
Sue Coletta reported in her recent post that copyrighted work has been stolen to train generative-AI models, causing outrage from authors and other creators.
In other words, don’t expect Mark Zuckerberg to be invited as the keynote at an Authors Guild banquet.
But, I thought, at least one skill can’t possibly be done by AI: writing humor.
(Some pre-AI examples below from Lexophile collections.)
Humor depends heavily on:
Circumstances: When smog lifts in Los Angeles, U.C.L.A.
Context: If you don’t pay your exorcist, you can get repossessed.
Juxtaposition: A will is a dead giveaway.
Irony: I didn’t like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.
Incongruity: Police were summoned to a daycare center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.
Unexpected connections: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
Timing: There are three problems with old age. First, your memory goes……….I can’t remember the other two.
Emotion: If you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.
Shared troubles: A lot of money is tainted. ‘Taint yours, and ‘taint mine.
AI could never understand these concepts, right? It can be taught to repeat jokes but can it ever be taught humor?
By now I figured someone must have tried to use AI to write humor. Down the research rabbit hole.
Milton Berle – public domain
Early versions of ChatGPT, GROK, Gemini, and others regurgitated jokes that were old back when Milton Berle stole them.
Then, like your annoying little brother, it repeats them ad nauseam.
Examples from Chat GPT 3:
What did the 5-year-old girl say when she asked for a pony? I guess I’ll take a unicow instead!
What did the fish say when it hit the wall? Dam!
Examples from ChatGPT4.o:
Why did the AI cross the road? To optimize the chicken’s path.
Why did the AI go to art school? To learn how to draw its own conclusions.
Why did the computer go to the doctor? It was full of viruses.
Example from GROK:
Why was the computer cold? Because it left its Windows open!
Examples from Bing:
A little girl was asked by her teacher what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said, “I want to be a princess.” The teacher said, “That’s nice, but you know you have to work hard and study hard to be a princess, right?” The girl said, “No, I don’t. I just have to marry Harry.”
When prompted for a joke about politicians, Bing replied:
I’m sorry but I don’t make jokes about politicians. They can be sensitive and controversial topics for some people. I hope you understand.
That’s a joke, right? Turns out, weirdly, it’s not.
Examples from Gemini:
Two AI researchers are arguing about the best way to achieve artificial consciousness. One says, “We need to focus on replicating the human brain in all its complexity.” The other scoffs, “Nonsense! All we need is a massive dataset of cat videos and a really catchy jingle.”
Suddenly, a voice booms from the lab’s supercomputer, “Hey, guys! Can you make up your minds already? I’m trying to learn how to meme here!”
Only one joke generation system sounded remotely interesting. It’s called Witscript, an app developed by Joe Toplyn, a former writer for Leno and Letterman. He also authored a book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV. in which he reverse-engineers the mechanics of creating jokes.
Toplyn is a Harvard grad in Engineering and Applied Physics, and has an MBA. He began studying a relatively new field called Computational Humor and figured researchers could feed his book’s reverse-engineering system into a computer to teach it humor. But progress was slow. In a 2024 interview, he says: “I decided if anybody was going to teach a computer to have a sense of humor, it was going to be me.” So he wrote the app himself.
Witscript offers different categories in which you enter a prompt.
Standup:
You input: Marriage is a lot like going to Costco.
Witscript responds: Because nothing says commitment like buying a year’s supply of toilet paper in bulk.
Captions for memes:
You input: What would a doctor in an examination room say to Mr. Potato Head?
Witscript responds: Looks like you need a little more than just some plastic surgery, Mr. Potato Head!
To liven speeches and articles:
You input: You may have heard that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Witscript responds: Well, I’m in luck then. My sweat glands are way more productive than my brain.
That one genuinely made me laugh.
Toplyn posts daily jokes written by Witscript on Twitter/X. Some are pretty good, others, meh.
Still, I found his approach different. He goes beyond typical internet scraping of jokes used my most AIs. Instead, he breaks down the mechanical structure of jokes and examines how the human brain connects the links among different elements to make up humor.
My recent TKZ post shows I’m not a fan of using AI for writing. The lack of ethics disturbs me, and environmental effects of data centers are chilling. But, like it or not, AI is here to stay.
Humor is supremely subjective. What I find funny makes you yawn. What leaves you rolling on the floor leaves me rolling my eyes.
From a human on Twitter: “I’ll worry about AI being funny when I hear it has a drug problem.”
So, TKZers, what do you think? Can a machine be taught humor? Will AI ever duplicate the rich emotional human experience that’s the foundation of humor?
~~~
All books in Debbie Burke’s Thrillers with Passion series are 100% human written. Learn more at this link.
I’m saying I’ll believe it when I see it. As you pointed out, humor is subjective. I’ll be sharing some human-generated humor in tomorrow’s post.
Terry, I’m not holding my breath either.
Mark Twain said: “Humor is tragedy plus time.” AI can throw up jokes in seconds but lacks the emotional experiences, perspective, and wisdom behind humor.
Ever is a long time. One day, probably. My lifetime? Not a chance.
Considering the emails I see that are AI generated, AI may be able to create a reasonable joke for a third grader soon. A pun? Shaggy dog story? Anything that Netflix would put on a comedy special? A funny insult in the middle of a story? Those are all decades away.
I did learn recently that an email starting with, “I hope you find this well…” means AI wrote it.
Hahaha, Alan. The sincerity and concern for our wellbeing from bots is disgusting, condescending, and insulting. But bots don’t care and never will. .
Thanks for braving the unfunny for today’s post, Debbie.
IMHO humor by probabilistic determination from a dataset of funny is anything but. Granted, some of these work on the level of groan and wince-inducing “dad jokes,” but real witty humor, the sort that causes laughter, is a very human thing.
I’m a huge fan of movie riffing, which is multi-faceted in its comedy, something Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax excel at. MST3K used to say, “the right people will get it.”
In the “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” classic MST3k episode, during a break, Joel asks the bots what they want for Christmas, and Crow T. Robot answers:
“I want to decide who lives and who dies.”
That’s darkly funny and t still makes me chuckle, and is something A.I. can’t do. Someday? Anything’s possible, but for me, just like with writing in general, humor is a human thing.
Well said, Dale!
Unfortunately, we’re getting way too close to: “I want to decide who lives and who dies.” In many cases, AI, rather than doctors, now determines which medical treatments are deemed necessary (IOW, covered)…or not.
The jokes don’t land with the punch of a human touch. They lack that same spark that AI fiction does. Even the delivery lacks snap. For example, the above joke would sound better this way: Marriage is a lot like going to Costco. Because nothing says commitment like buying a year’s supply of toilet paper
in bulk.When AI starts channeling Steven Wright, I’ll be impressed….or terrified.
Jim, you’re so right that delivery is key. Just ask the old time greats like Groucho, Jack Benny, George Burns, and Johnny Carson.
Can a machine be taught humor?
I believe it can be taught humor, but only to reproduce it, not to laugh at it. (And notice, we use the designation “it” when referring to AI. That says it all, doesn’t it?)
Will AI ever duplicate the rich emotional human experience that’s the foundation of humor?
No. When an AI platform is given a human soul, maybe. But even then, “Humor is tragedy plus time.” Just can’t get around that truth.
And speaking of truth, will “it” ever recognize what is truth and what is a lie without human intervention? I think not, IMHO.
Great discussion, Debbie! It seems like AI, indeed, is here to stay, and we’d best keep an eye on it. (Pun intended…)
🙂
Deb, if engineers try to give AI a soul, what they’d come up with would be eons from a true soul. And truly scary.
“I hope you find this well…” That is the best joke AI has created so far. At least it’s a way to weed out spam emails.
I can’t imagine AI being intentionally funny…and Al used to be a perfectly good secondary character’s name.
Pat, is there a setting that automatically sends any email that starts “I hope you find this well” to spam?
Actually I think there is a filter that does that in email settings. lol
If humor (and storytelling) is born out of human experience, the best AI can hope to do is copy what’s there. It can never be truly creative.
I liked the jokes from the Lexophile collections.
Kay, some Lexophite jokes are quite clever an punny.
Just saw this one:
“Don’t join dangerous cults: Practice safe sects.”
I’m working on a humorous Cozy Mystery series and asked Claude 3.7, Chat 4.5, Gemini, and Grok 3 to rework a 500 word portion of the first scene to introduce more humor and none of them nailed it. I had spent some time creating character profiles and style guides even to help them out and still the results weren’t there. BTW, some of the changes made in the scene were pretty good though.
We have nothing to worry about AI taking over for the near future. From what I’ve read on posts, even successful Romance authors using AI still have to put in hours editing and rewriting. Even the latest versions still can’t 100% nail the “feels”.
The big stink about Ai training missed the important part: Books were taken from pirate websites. The AI companies didn’t “steal” those books, they were already stolen. One full series of my PNR is up on them. I just sigh and look at it like I’ve lost a library royalty and move on.
Oops, I mistakenly posted the repy in Sharon’s comment.
Not only is humor subjective, but it’s cultural, and difficult for a non-native speaker to grasp. I remember when I lived in France, I learned to speak and understand the language quite well, but I rarely got their jokes.
I think of AI as a non-native speaker.
Fred, pirates are a game of whack-a-mole. I wrote about them in 2020 https://killzoneblog.com/2020/01/linkedin-tied-to-book-piracy.html
and again in 2024
https://killzoneblog.com/2024/10/true-crime-thursday-no-honor-among-thieves.html
The most productive response is to hunker down and write excellent stories that AI could never create–no matter how much internet scraping it does or copyrighted works it steals.
Sharon, a great point about native and non-native speakers! Language and cultural differences are huge factors. I often don’t “get” British humor even though we supposedly share the same language.
This is a terrific essay. We forget that people who write humor also bomb a lot of the time. Often humor depends on the delivery, timing, and current circumstances. Watch some old Johnny Carson on You Tube. He was a master at these things. Or Jack Benny who could turn a so-so joke into a laugh with a look. Think of Artie Shaw on the old Laugh-In show. These comedians and dozens of others were doing things that no AI can ever reproduce.
Wait a minute. A good novel also depends on delivery, internal timing (pacing) and current circumstances. Good lesson for us all.
Brian, very true that comedians bomb many times for every joke that hits the mark. Rooms full of professional humor writers generate hundreds of jokes for every short monologue we see on late-night TV.
Delivery and timing absolutely! Carson and Benny were champions who saved many a joke from dead silence in the audience.
I feel like the human on Twitter, Debbie. Can’t waste time or brain power worrying about what could happen.
Sue, I don’t have time or brain power to spare either. Just keep turning out more great books, my friend.
“Think of Artie Shaw on the old Laugh-In show.”
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” –Jack Benny
“Verrrry interesting.” –Arte Johnson
“Dat’s de mos’ ridiculous t’ing I evah hoid!” –Karl Marx
“I’m 85, but I still have a memory like one of those big grey animals.” –J Guenther
AI jokes, if there are any, will, ultimately, all be on us.
“…memory like one of those big gray animals.”
J, you put me on the floor with that one! Thanks!!!
Thx, Debbie. That’s the only joke I’ve ever written. It was inspired by a 3-liner from an old TV show. I stripped off the build-up and supplied a new punchline.
J, in the proud tradition of Uncle Miltie, I’m gonna steal that joke.
One of my favorite SF books is Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In it, the becoming-sentient computer, Mike, wants desperately to tell jokes, and they train him by discussing lists of his attempts as he writes them (in small batches), and giving him feedback.
Mike learns, and by the end of the book is getting some of it right.
And then he goes dark, and no one can reach him. For me, he had already become conscious, and I still miss him.
Alicia, Heinlein, Bradbury, Wells, Orwell, and others showed uncanny accuracy in their predictions of the future. Sometimes I wonder if they used a time machine to visit the 21st century, then raced back to their own time, breathing huge sighs of relief.
I find it difficult to feel there is anything good about AI. Academically, it’s a scourge. I’ve had to severely change the way I teach to get around it. Stories and papers have to be handwritten, for one thing—some of them in class to establish a baseline. This year I had my high schoolers write a lot of short stories. Later in the year, one of them handed in a paper. I spoke with her later and said, “This first sentence doesn’t sound like you. Did you get it from the internet?” Her jaw dropped. She wanted to know how I knew. I responded, “It just didn’t sound like you. I’ve read a lot of what you’ve written this year. It wasn’t your voice.” It turns out she had gone to the internet because she didn’t know how to begin the paper. Math is just as bad. I have to be careful and look for work that a student wouldn’t produce. Perfect homework. Terrible tests. Dead giveaway.
Beth, I can’t even imagine the frustration and disappointment teachers must experience when student cheat with AI. How can they ever learn critical thinking, reasoning, and problem solving when a few keystrokes provide instant (although often incorrect) answers.
Please keep fighting the good fight for the kids’ sakes, even if they don’t appreciate that you make them work. Thank you for your dedication.