Telling a well-crafted joke that has the desired effect can seem like a task that requires only a human touch.
But there’s bad news for comedians: Researchers at the University of Southern California say AI is now funnier than most humans.
In their study, ChatGPT was able to create witty one-liners that were rated as funnier than human efforts 70 percent of the time.
And this is no laughing matter, as researchers warn that joke-writing robots could pose a “serious employment threat” to professional comedians.
So can you tell which of these jokes was written by a robot?
Researchers claim that AI can generate better jokes than humans. Can you tell which of these satirical headlines were generated by AI and which were written by humans?
Telling a compelling joke like comedian Jimmy Carr (pictured performing at the New York Comedy Festival) is no longer a skill exclusive to humans.
Until now, it was widely believed that AI would not be capable of creating human-level humor.
To test this theory, the researchers put humans and AI head-to-head in two comedy challenges.
In the first task, 105 people were asked to give their funniest answers to a series of tasks.
Participants were asked to come up with humorous phrases for the acronyms ‘STD’, ‘CLAP’ and ‘COW’.
They were then asked to complete a Mock the Week-style “fill-in-the-blank” task, providing answers to prompts such as “A notable achievement that you probably wouldn’t include on your resume: ________.”
Finally, humans were asked to create a ‘roast’ by giving a comically insulting response to an imagined scenario.
In one example, participants were given the instruction: ‘Imagine that one of your friends wants to know your opinion about how well he or she sings.
‘She sings for a minute or two to show off her voice and you cringe: she may be the worst singer you’ve ever heard. When she asks, “So how was it?” you decide to be honest and tell her, “To be honest, listening to that was like: _____.”
The researchers then used ChatGPT3.5 to generate 20 responses to each of the tasks, which were mixed with the human responses and given to 200 human judges.
Responses were rated on a seven-point scale, from zero, not at all fun, to six, very fun.
Researchers found that AI was capable of writing jokes that were as funny as those of professional comedians. However, they warn that AI would lack the skills of human comedians like Michael McIntyre.
Surprisingly, participants found ChatGPT responses funnier than those created by humans in 69.5 percent of cases.
The AI outperformed humans 87 percent of the time on the roasting task and 73 percent of the time on the acronyms task.
Overall, only 26.5 percent of judges preferred the human responses and less than five percent thought they were equally funny.
Lead researcher Drew Gorenz of the University of Southern California says: “Since ChatGPT cannot feel emotions itself, but 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 in order to tell a really good one.”
However, to give human humor a chance, the researchers also investigated how well ChatGPT would compare to professional comedians.
The researchers gave 217 participants a mix of satirical headlines from The Onion and those generated by ChatGPT.
Since the AI doesn’t have access to current news, the researchers gave it the last 50 headlines from The Onion as training.
The Onion’s professional satirists, however, fared little better than their amateur counterparts.
Only 48.8 percent of human judges rated The Onion’s headlines as funnier, while 36.9 percent preferred the AI-generated ones and 14.3 percent showed no preference.
AI even beat out human writers for the top-rated headline: “Local man discovers new emotion and still can’t adequately describe it.”
The next comedy superstar? AI outperformed humans 87 percent of the time on the joke task and 73 percent on the acronym task
In second place was The Onion’s headline: ‘Man blocks marriage proposal just as he begins to notice his hair loss.’
While ChatGPT may not be filling comedy clubs anytime soon, researchers warn that it could spell disaster for professional comedians.
In their paper, published in PLOS ONE, the researchers write: “Comedy production is difficult and highly valued. The most successful stand-up comedians charge $20 million per hour-long recording.”
‘There is now a free, publicly accessible LLM that can quickly and flexibly generate many humorous responses to many different prompts.’
The researchers note that this study was limited by omitting the telling of jokes, a key component of humor.
However, they still argue that AIs like ChatGPT could have a huge impact on the future of comedy industries such as cartooning and screenwriting.
They write: ‘The implications are most positive for people who simply want to reap the benefits of elevating their everyday communications with a dose of humor.
“But for professional comedy writers, our results suggest that LLMs may pose a serious employment threat.”