I, Lolbot
Will AI make comedy writers extinct? Let's hope so!
Inside every fear is a wish. Who wouldn’t want to be replaced by a machine?
To allow yourself to melt away while some gleaming being steps into the breach. After all, to exist at all is to dream of getting out of it.
Artificial intelligence, with its promises to do to my bank account what the spinning jenny did to our ancestor’s self-respect seems to promise just that. Finally we can outsource human joy!
But can an algorithm really liberate us from the confusing and exhausting process of trying to entertain each other?
It was time for me to gaze into the horrid black heart of the future and find out…
Of course, I wanted Chat GPT to be shit. It’s bad enough to be replaced by a younger better-looking human let alone a machine, so I approached the task with all the open-minded curiosity of farmhand sneaking up on a threshing machine with a fixed grin and a wrench behind their back. Its early efforts only goaded me on.
Hmm. It turns out this sort of on-the-nose style was quite typical of Chat GPT, which normally failed to transcend the premise, only generating a funny joke if the prompt was equally funny kind of defeating the point, since if I already knew exactly where the joke was I wouldn’t ask an AI to write it.
To add to its crimes, Chat GPT loved puns and interpreted the prompt “joke” as essentially “cracker joke,” a lack of imagination which extended to one-liners, revealing itself to be as hostile to new gag formats as me in a post-lunch slump.
It’s not flattering to admit your job sometimes makes you feel like a robot but there are times when I am grinding out 40 jokes about the economic crisis denuded of all normal human emotion like a mechanical arm at a meat rendering factory when I don’t exactly feel like Robin Williams in Patch Adams, so I sort of sympathised with Chat GPT here.
However more troublingly, it also refuses to produce anything offensive.
“Upholding a positive and respectful tone”? In this economy? Hah!
This response conjures a future where human comedy writers are employed solely for the purpose of taking legal responsibility for Chat GPT’s broadsides, their authorship a sort of legal fiction, like an offshore investment vehicle. Any why not? I’m not proud. I will happily be an algorithm’s edgelord avatar.
Sadly, Chat GPT cannot write sketches as it doesn’t understand the concept of conflict, a twist, a button or the fickle nature of the human attention span but I can nevertheless imagine the sort of dystopian future, predicted by the Writers Guild of America, where I am asked to reverse engineer those features on its behalf.
But its biggest problem is the most obvious, namely that - whatever confused coders might like to imagine while they’re having a nervous breakdown - it’s not alive.
In his essay, Laughter, Henri Bergson suggests that one of the main sources of humour is things behaving like people or people behaving like things (“something mechanical encrusted on the living”)1. He is wrong (or only partially right) and I kind of feel that, like with a lot of theories of humour, he just hadn’t thought about it that much. Sorry! Or was overly influenced by his need to see jokes as a tool of either political liberation or coercion when they’re neither precisely or, having made lots of interesting if unrelated points about comedy, wanted to end by bringing them together with a grand flourish (I feel his pain). But I’ll give Henri some credit, it completely describes my experience of Chat GPT.
Now, take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his actions are all topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every case the effect is invariably one of momentum. Habit has given the impulse: what was wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He did nothing of the sort, but continued like a machine in the same straight line. The victim, then, of a practical joke is in a position similar to that of a runner who falls,—he is comic for the same reason. The laughable element in both cases consists of a certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being. The only difference in the two cases is that the former happened of itself, whilst the latter was obtained artificially. In the first instance, the passer-by does nothing but look on, but in the second the mischievous wag intervenes.
Chat GPT is the man repeatedly dunking his pen in the muck. When Chat GPT made me laugh the most it was always in the same way that I’d laugh at BOOBS on a calculator or a dog unwittingly wearing a funny hat. I’d give it an insane prompt, and it would plod off to retrieve me a response in its sort earnest, leaden way.
In day-to-day terms, the genuinely helpful thing about Chat GPT, I think, is that it exposes the low-hanging fruit. If all you’re doing is recombining existing ideas to a proven format, then Chat GPT will show you that by sarcastically imitating you. It’s possible that in the same way Twitter made certain sorts of jokes low-status by showing thousands of individuals simultaneously thinking of them, Chat GPT will shame the robot in you. Obviously I don’t want that to happen – I need that janky little guy! – but it might.
Above all, Chat GPT reminded me of what I like about jokes in the first place: they puncture loneliness and cannot entirely be reduced to a formula, so (in the unlikely event people value those qualities enough to pay for them) maybe we will be kept around to amuse the robots for a while yet.
In summary:
Oh shit, I’m fucked.