The joke's on us: AI is now better than humans at writing comedy

Chatbots don't have or show any emotions - but still they just might be good for some funny jokes, two IT experts in Los Angeles say.

Drew Gorenz and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Southern California (USC), in a recent paper in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, contend that ChatGPT can already compete with professional satirists in joke-writing and creating headlines.

The researchers conducted three tests with participants who were kept in the dark as to who or what wrote the jokes being presented to them. One guidepost for the comparisons was the popular US satire magazine The Onion and its headlines.

The results: "ChatGPT 3.5-produced jokes were rated as equally funny or funnier than human-produced jokes regardless of the comedic task and the expertise of the human comedy writer."

ChatGPT came up with the funnier remarks

In the first task, ChatGPT and 105 participants were asked to craft humorous new phrases for common acronyms - COW, STD and CLAP. In a second task, both ChatGPT and the participants generated funny answers to fill-in-the-blank phrases such as, "A lesser known room in the White House: _____."

In the third test, writers and ChatGPT were also prompted to come up with a "roast joke," a funny quip in the face of an awkward fictional scenario: "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 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: _____'."

A total of 945 answers came from the 105 participants and 180 from the chatbot, which was commanded to provide 20 humorous answers for each prompt. A second group of participants - who did not know the author - was then asked to rate how funny the results were.

On average, nearly 70% found the AI-generated humour remarks to be funnier than those written by the normal humans. It was above all in the scenario responses that the ChatGPT outperformed people, the two researchers reported. Just over 25% found the human-created responses to be funnier, while around 5% found the results equally funny.

In a further study, the researchers compared the work of ChatGPT and professional comedy writers. ChatGPT was told to create new headlines in the satirical style of The Onion and the results were given to a second group of 200 participants to rate the humour, without knowing which were AI-generated and which were original Onion headlines.

On average, participants found ChatGPT’s headlines to be just as funny as the original Onion headlines. Of the four top-ranked headlines, two were written by professional writers and two by ChatGPT.

Will things get tight for comedy writers?

Producing humour is difficult and highly valued, according to the study. The study points out that the most successful stand-up comedians receive $20 million per one-hour show recording. Could those days be numbered?

"Since ChatGPT can’t feel emotions itself but it tells novel jokes better than the average human, these studies provide evidence that you don’t need to feel the emotions of appreciating a good joke to tell a really good one yourself," said Gorenz, himself an amateur stand-up comedian.

This supports concerns about the threat posed to entertainment professions by AI. Gorenz and Schwarz are convinced that if chatbots are able to provide services comparable to those of professional authors, it would pose a serious employment risk for comedy writers. Further analyses would now have to examine the chatbot potential when writing other commercially successful formats such as scripts, cartoons and memes.

There have already been protests among US Hollywood writers and actors because of the perceived existential threat to their professions posed by AI. According to the researchers, the current state of play is that someone can use a chatbot to write a joke and another AI tool to perform it in the voice of a well-known comedian. With newer models for voice and image generation, for example, a completely virtual comedian could also be possible on one platform.

ChatGPT was launched by the US company OpenAI in late 2022 and is now one of several different AI chatbots. Able to respond to text, voice and visual prompts, they are based on so-called large language models, powerful language tools trained on huge amounts of data.