AI creating, telling, and understanding a genuinely funny joke may signal the onset of true artificial general intelligence, and possibly AI consciousness, argues computer scientist and writer of Can we hack our way out of the universe?, Roman Yampolskiy. But the onset of funny AI may be no laughing matter. If we fail to align AI properly, we may be the butt of a joke that ends humanity – well, at least we might all die laughing.
“In a theatre, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke” – Søren Kierkegaard
“I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.” – Frank A. Clark
Introduction
Despite interest and active research by many scholars (Freud, Minsky, Schmidhuber, Horvitz, Etc.) humor remains unsolved. Even more interestingly, despite tremendous progress in AI capabilities, as compared to human experts, in art, music, translation, games, and science no similar progress has been seen in artificial humor generation, at least as of May 4, 2025. An example of a joke an AI can generate is given below:
“Human: I like how cute cows are
Meena: Ah, interesting. You like how they are cute, right?
Human: yeah, and they’re really smart
Meena: I heard they go to college
Human: cows go to college?
Meena: I heard that a cow went to Harvard.
Human: what did the cow study?
Meena: Bovine sciences.
Human: do horses go to Harvard?
Meena: Horses go to Hayvard.
Human: that’s a pretty good joke, I feel like you led me into it
Meena: You were trying to steer it elsewhere, I can see it.”.
Many attempts at generating humor have historically been reported, but none so far have achieved capabilities of a top human comedian. Notwithstanding being able to explain jokes since early GPT models, AI seems to be incapable of producing novel jokes of quality comparable to a human standup comedian. In fact, it may be one of the last remaining, unconquered by AI, skills left in the human superiority arsenal and may perhaps be the missing fire alarm for arrival of true Artificial General Intelligence.