At one of the London concerts, stand-up comedian Karen Hobbs faced a challenge: she had to perform a stand-up written not by her, but by the ChatGPT platform. She was used to a serious British audience, but this performance was special because her material was created by artificial intelligence. And there were comedians on stage with their own jokes, which raised the stakes.
Artificial intelligence has already had a significant impact on various areas of life, from copywriting to education, but its ability to create, particularly humor, is a matter of controversy. ChatGPT works by analyzing huge amounts of text, creating new combinations of existing information. However, whether this can be called true creativity remains an open question.
How humor works
To understand whether AI can be witty, we need to first understand the very principle of humor. According to Alison Powell, a researcher at the London School of Economics, humor is an instinctive response that depends on context and instantaneous understanding of the situation. Improv comedians, including Powell herself, note that a joke is born out of instinct, which makes AI humor secondary and predictable.
Another challenge for comedians is that many generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, use content taken from the Internet for training. This may include materials without the author’s permission. Thus, people’s creativity is at risk. There is already a growing concern among content creators about how AI uses their work.
Technologies and jokes
Comedians can sleep easy for a while longer, as AI is not yet able to outdo humans in creating humor. When ChatGPT generates jokes, they are often based on stereotypes or platitudes. For example, in the case of Karen Hobbs, the AI created material with typical gender stereotypes about a girl who likes shopping.
However, AI technologies continue to evolve. Research shows that in the future, AI may be able to achieve a higher level of contextual understanding and create wittier jokes. Although large speech models cannot currently adapt to real-world conditions during a speech, future models may be able to better interact with the audience.
Despite the imperfections of artificial intelligence in the field of humor, its use for writing jokes is becoming increasingly popular. In addition to creating scripts for stand-up, AI is already used in various comedy shows and to generate entertainment content on social media. For example, AI-based programs help to create jokes for memes, satirical videos, and even animated shows.
Companies use AI to create content that is relevant to a specific audience or cultural context. This means that AI can analyze data on humor trends and adapt its material to be as relevant as possible to specific groups. In particular, many brands have already started using automated platforms to generate humorous posts on social media, increasing user engagement.
AI models for creating humorous content
Code-davinci-002
Today, there are already artificial intelligence models specially designed for creative tasks. For example, code-davinci-002, developed by OpenAI, is capable of generating quite interesting jokes. One such example: “The budget of the new Batman movie grows to $200 million as the director insists on using the real Batman”. Although the humor remains subjective, such jokes often exceed expectations.
DeepMoji
DeepMoji is an AI model that was originally developed to recognize emotions in emoji-based texts. However, its capabilities were later extended to create humorous content. It can analyze the context and emotional sentiment of a text, generating jokes that are appropriate for a specific audience. DeepMoji is often used to create humorous posts on social media, particularly for brands looking to increase user engagement through entertaining content.
Botnik
Botnik is a content creation platform that uses AI algorithms to generate humorous texts. It combines human creativity with machine learning capabilities, allowing users to create original jokes and scripts. Botnik has a special tool for comic writers that helps them to select phrases that match the chosen topic.
DALL-E
DALL-E is another OpenAI product that specializes in creating images based on text descriptions. Although it doesn’t create text jokes, it can be used to generate comedic images or memes. The user can enter a humorous description, and DALL-E will create an image that can be used for entertainment or social media.
Wit.ai
Wit.ai is a platform for developing bots and interactive systems that can generate humorous responses. It is actively used to create chatbots that can “joke” and maintain an entertaining conversation with users. This is especially useful for brands that use humor as part of their marketing strategy.
Conclusions
On stage in London, Hobbs was able to test ChatGPT’s jokes on a real audience. While they may have been funny to first-time attendees, more experienced viewers will likely be looking for more than just a repeat of jokes from social media.
AI is constantly improving and will create more interesting and relevant jokes over time, but it can’t replace human ingenuity and the ability to respond to an audience.