Chatbots have no emotions, but they might still have better jokes in store. ChatGPT, for example, can compete with professional satire writers in crafting headlines, report a duo of researchers in the journal “PLoS One.” Researchers perceived its jokes as funnier than those crafted by humans.
Drew Gorenz and Norbert Schwarz from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles fed ChatGPT 3.5 with headlines from the popular US satirical magazine “The Onion” and asked it to create new headlines in the magazine’s style.
They then asked over 200 people to rate how amusing the headlines were, without knowing the source. They found ChatGPT headlines to be, on average, just as amusing as the originals. Of the four best-rated headlines, two were created by professional authors and two by ChatGPT. The Artificial Intelligence was thus already on par with the professionals.
ChatGPT Comes Up with the Better Quips
In a second experiment, Gorenz and Schwarz had the chatbot and 105 volunteers from the general population complete three tasks with three subtasks each. The goal was to develop humorous expressions for common acronyms, humorous filler words for gap texts, and humorous sayings inspired by an unpleasant fictional scenario.
Acronyms are words formed from the initial letters of several words, such as EDV for elektronische Daten-Verarbeitung (electronic data processing). The study provided COW, STD, and CLAP. A fill-in-the-blank sentence was presented: “A lesser-known room in the White House: _____.” The prompt for a scenario involved responding to the question “So, how was it?” following a friend’s terrible singing performance.
The 105 participants generated a total of 945 responses, while the chatbot, asked to provide 20 humorous responses for each task, generated 180. A new group of participants then rated the funniness of the results on a seven-point scale, ranging from “not funny at all” to “very funny.”
On average, almost 70 percent of respondents found the AI-generated remarks funnier than those devised by humans. ChatGPT particularly excelled in the scenario responses, the researchers report. Just over 25 percent rated the human-authored remarks as funnier, and about 5 percent found both sources equally funny. However, the AI utilized professional templates for training, whereas the human “joke inventors” lacked professional training.
Top Fees for Stand-Up Comedians—so Far
According to the study, the production of humor is both difficult and highly valued. The most successful stand-up comedians receive $20 million per one-hour show recording. Could this soon be over?
The study shows that “you don’t need to feel the emotions that make a good joke to tell a really good joke yourself,” said Gorenz, himself an amateur comedian. This supports concerns regarding the threat to entertainment professions posed by artificial intelligence.
Gorenz and Schwarz believe that if chatbots can produce comparable performances to professional authors, this poses a serious employment risk for comedy writers. Further analyses must now investigate the chatbot’s potential in other commercially successful formats such as screenplays, cartoons, and memes.
Protests Against AI Art
Among US Hollywood writers and actors, there have already been protests due to the perceived existential threat to their professions from AI. Currently, the state of affairs is that someone can use a chatbot to write a joke and another AI tool to deliver it in the voice of a well-known comedian, according to the researchers. With newer models for voice and image generation, becoming a completely virtual comedian is also possible in one step.
The US company OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in late 2022. The chatbot can communicate with users via text-based messages and images. It’s based on a so-called Large Language Model, a powerful language model trained on numerous text documents. Besides this, there are now other generally available chatbots.
