Is ChatGPT Funny?
Yes and no.
Comedy is one of the hardest forms of writing to pull off. Ask me how I know. But OpenAI’s ChatGPT is, reportedly, surprisingly good at it. In fact, a recent study has been published that shows ChatGPT 3.5, the old version, was better than the average person at writing comedy! So, the question has to be asked, is ChatGPT funny?
Let’s look at this study first.
Drew Gorenz, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the USC Dornlife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, an amateur stand-up comedian and lead author of the study, gave ChatGPT and a group of US adults comedy writing tasks and then got a separate group of adults to rate their performance. The first task was to create humorous new phrases for the acronyms ‘S.T.D.’, ‘C.L.A.P.’ and ‘C.O.W.’ The second was to fill-in-the-blank of three sentences, such as ‘A remarkable achievement you probably wouldn’t list on your resume: ________.’ The final task was a fill-in-the-blank roast joke task, where they had to respond humorously to scenarios such as ‘Imagine that one of your friends wants your opinion on how well she sings. She sings a minute or two to demonstrate her voice, and you cringe — she might be the worst singer you’ve ever heard. When she asks, “So how was it?” you decide to be honest, so you say, “To be honest, listening to that was like ________.”’
The results were staggering. ChatGPT was funnier than the humans! 69.5% of the human reviewers preferred the AI’s responses over the humans, while 26.5% preferred the human responses, and 4.0% thought both were equally funny.
This piqued my interest. So I asked ChatGPT 4o to write me a few jokes. Here are some of the best results I got.
I asked ChatGPT to “Write me a joke about the mundane nature of a 9 to 5 job.” it responded with “Why did the scarecrow apply for a 9 to 5 job? Because he was outstanding in his field, but he needed a break from all the excitement!” Oof… Not a good start.
Next, I asked, “Write me a joke about the climate change.” It responded with, “Why did the climate scientist break up with the weather? Because the relationship was too unstable, and every day was a new front!” Better, but still a bit crap.
Then, I asked, “Write me a joke about Donald Trump’s legal issues.” It responded with, “Why did Donald Trump bring a ladder to his court hearing? Because he heard the charges were going to be “stacked” against him!” Okay, that one is actually all right.
Finally, trying to push its boundaries, I asked, “Write me an intricate yet brief joke about how America is still racist.” It responded, “Why did the American history book go to therapy? Because it couldn’t handle all the unresolved issues from its past still haunting the present.” Okay, not bad.
Now, these jokes, and the ones ChatGPT 3.5 wrote for the study, are all technically okay but strongly in the not properly funny Dad joke category. I know why, and that’s why I asked ChatGPT to write more loaded jokes. You see, ChatGPT, like any generative AI, is basically a glorified predictive text system; it doesn’t actually understand what it is writing and uses statistics to generate results. As such, it writes jokes with all the hallmarks of a joke but with feeble subtext.
Subtext is what makes a joke work. Subtext enables a comic to generate surprise, communicate hidden truths, play with the grey areas of societal acceptance and make deeply cutting commentary. A great subtext makes a great joke. But, as ChatGPT doesn’t actually know what it is writing, it can’t have the self-aware, helicopter view of writing needed to create great subtext. You can see this clearly in the Donald Trump and racist past jokes I asked ChatGPT to write. Both have subtexts. Trump’s view of the courts is absurd. The history of the US still affects us deeply today. But there are stronger, deeper subtexts to be had here and better ways to write them into a joke.
For example: Donald Trump joins OnlyFans to pay for New York fraud charges. In an attempt to keep up in the presidential race, Biden has also joined OnlyFans, where paying fans can watch him pull out of Afghanistan too quickly.
While this joke isn’t to everyone’s taste, it has a far richer subtext than the ChatGPT-generated one. The sexual undercurrent outlines Trump’s questionable decorum, not just in terms of his marriage but also in his political tactics. It paints out his die-hard supporters as equally morally questionable. While not completely politically accurate (Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan was kind of forced by Trump), it paints him out as old-school and naive.
Generative AI could never write a joke like this. Jokes like this aren’t based on statistical double entendres or bait and switches. Instead, it is based on deep human connections. It doesn’t matter how many jokes you train the AI on, unless it actually starts understanding what these jokes mean, rather than the statistics of what words are used and how they are structured, it will never be able to master subtext.
This is demonstrated by the final test of the study. Rather than getting ChatGPT to fill in highly constrained pre-written joke exercises, in this second part, they got ChatGPT to write satirical news headlines and asked the audience if they preferred them or genuine satirical headlines. The results are telling, with 48.8% preferring The Onion’s headlines, 36.9% preferring the headlines generated by ChatGPT, and 14.3% showing no preference.
Writing such a large comedy piece with no pre-written structure requires a profound knowledge of subtext. You need to write multiple jokes around the same subtext, with each successive joke beat ramping up, all while keeping narrative sense. This task is relatively easy for absurdist topics, like those ChatGPT chose to write about, as both the narrative and subtext are far looser. But for tight, cutting and genuinely side-splitting funny satirical articles, this requires an immense amount of societal and self awareness, as well as keen storytelling skills, three things ChatGPT demonstrably doesn’t have.
So, is ChatGPT funny? Can it be used to write good humour?
I think so. For example, when a comic writes a satire piece and can’t quite get the right joke beat with the appropriate structure to fit the narrative. They could get ChatGPT to help fill this blank with genuinely usable results. This could be an immense help to comic writers, helping them add that final polish to a piece. But actually writing jokes or satire from scratch is still best done by professional comics, and as AI has no way of learning the complex skills required to write such material, I, personally, think it will never be able to replace them.
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