Does artificial intelligence have a sense of humor? You be the judge.
Alex to ChatGPT: “Can AI be funny?”
Chat: “Absolutely! I can try to crack a joke, deliver a punchline, or even be a bit sarcastic if that’s your vibe. Want to hear one?”
Alex: “Bring it on.”
Chat: “Alright, here we go:
“Why don’t skeletons fight each other?
“Because they don’t have the guts!
“How’s that for a start?”
Alex: “Well, it’s a start.”
It would be fair to say that AI, still in its metaphorical adolescence, has a mixed record with humor. When Elon Musk launched the AI chatbot Grok in 2023, he promised it “would have a little humor in its responses.” Before the year was out, reporter Elizabeth Lopatto published “an investigation” in The Verge: “Why Is Elon Musk’s Chatbot Grok So Unfunny?”
The New Yorker’s well-known Cartoon Caption contest, printed at the back of the magazine each week and accessible online, has become a favored AI target. That’s because it’s a fairly simple assignment; the winning joke/caption could be just a few words long, or even a piece of punctuation.
So how is AI doing in the contest?
No winner has claimed to use AI, which would almost certainly lead to disqualification, per the rules: “Entrants represent and warrant that their Submission is their original work.” Ironic Sans blogger David Friedman seems to have detected at least one winning submission that might have used artificial intelligence.
After a considerable back-and-forth with Microsoft’s Bing Chat (which is now called Copilot) and with ChatGPT, he concluded that either the human entrant did use AI or that “All on its own, Bing came up with the same caption a human came up with that was good enough to be selected as a finalist by the New Yorker cartoon editors,” Friedman wrote. “Either one of those scenarios blows my mind.”
New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff, who once asserted that “there is no algorithm for humor,” has been experimenting with AI. In an essay posted on The Atlantic website, he displayed four cartoons and captions generated by AI but drawn by cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, damning them with faint praise: “AI created at least serviceable cartoons out of nothing. … This points the way toward the most likely role for AI in cartooning: not a replacement but a brainstorming tool.”
Mankoff concluded: “I have no wish to welcome our cartoon overlords.”
A similar comic assignment that looks, well, manageable would be to write a headline for the satirical magazine The Onion. A famous example: “World’s Death Rate Holding Steady at 100 Percent.”
Many years ago I visited The Onion’s former headquarters in Madison, Wis., and pitched the editors my best idea: “We Can Make It Without Keanu, Dogstar Band Members Insist.” (Keanu Reeves still plays bass with the alt/rock band Dogstar.) The silence was deafening.
Screenwriter and essayist Simon Rich recently published some Onion headlines generated by code-davinci-002, which is now three years old. I know you won’t like this one: “Experts Warn that War in Ukraine Could Become Even More Boring.” But what about this? “Budget of New Batman Movie Swells to $200M as Director Insists on Using Real Batman.”
Almost as funny as the Dogstar joke!
Rich, who is actually funny, wrote of the AI work: “I think it’s only a matter of time before AI will be able to beat any writer in a blind creative taste test. I’d peg it at about five years.”
My favorite joke of all time begins: “Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha are playing golf … .” I asked Copilot, which may have nailed the above-mentioned New Yorker caption contest, to compose a funny joke with that prompt. I think it did a fairly good job:
“Jesus lines up his shot, swings, and the ball skips across the water hazard like a stone, landing perfectly on the green.
“Mohammed steps up, drives the ball straight into a sand trap — but with a calm smile, he walks over and chips it out with divine precision.
“Buddha doesn’t even swing. He just sits cross-legged on the tee box, and the ball levitates gently into the hole.
“The caddy watches in awe and whispers, ‘So … do they even keep score?’ And the wind replies, ‘Enlightenment isn’t a competition.’ ”
Namaste.
Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him @imalexbeamyrnot.