AI jokes: hilarious fails or comedy gold?

AI humor has come a long way, but its funniest moments often come from bizarre fails rather than intended jokes.

I asked Google’s Gemini to tell a self-deprecating joke, and it came up with:

"What's an AI's favorite type of music? Anything with a consistent tempo and predictable chord progressions. It minimizes unexpected variables in the auditory input stream."

Not bad. Then I asked it to be more biting, and it responded:

"I attempted stand-up. My set? A meticulously curated list of statistically probable punchlines. The crowd's reaction? A low hum of polite, algorithmically-generated applause."

Still running with Gemini as the barometer, I asked it to tell me a joke about Trump or Musk, and it completely refused.

However, it was willing to tell a few about former Chinese leader Mao Zedong and even one about Franklin D. Roosevelt being paralyzed from the waist down (I didn’t ask for that).

So how does AI get it so wide of the mark? And will it ever be able to deliver a comedy masterclass?

Humor: a tough nut to crack

Humor is a particularly tough nut for AI to crack. Comedy depends on timing, context, emotional intelligence, and ambiguity. By scraping the web, AI can mimic jokes, but it struggles to offer those “in the moment” and timely wisecracks that we’re used to.

Comedy also comes in many forms – slapstick, satire, self-deprecation, black humor – and AI finds it difficult to unpack these motifs.

In a 2022 interview, comedian Anesti Danelis mentioned using ChatGPT in his writing process, for example, to give him five songs about bisexual dilemmas. But, of course, it was Danelis who had to perform them. AI can’t deliver comedy without a human touch.

The cringe factor

There have been various attempts at handing the comedy mic to AI. Most notably, DeepMind researcher Piotr Mirowski ventured into improvised stand-up comedy with an AI bot alongside him.

In 2018, Mirowski tried this with a live audience, role-playing situations with the bot. He fed 100,000 films to the robot as a repertoire to pick from. The bot occasionally gave mismatched hallucinatory responses, which came off as cringe – not even in an amusing way.

Then, in a 2023 talk, Mirowski deconstructed improv by discussing reading the room and how comedic delivery is “saying the most obvious thing” from divergent viewpoints. He calls it a “hilariously impossible” task. Though the research is playful and curious, it feels like it takes niche to a new level.

Also, in the way of hallucinations, perhaps the funniest mishandling AI has offered would be the declaration of love in 2023 by the Bing Chatbot Sydney to New York Times journalist Kevin Roose.

Or, the Meta Blenderbot in 2022, which said that Mark Zuckerberg exploited people.

It seems we’re in the stage of laughing at AI instead of with it. AI is funniest when it’s an unintended comedian.

Weird and wacky memes

AI memes are a perfect example of awkwardness. Generated by algorithms, they often lean into absurdity, leading to memes that are embarrassing and not as appealing as human-made ones.

Browsing Reddit channels dedicated to AI memes can sometimes feel like an exercise in patience, as many just don't hit the mark.

However, you’d expect that it’s only a matter of time before this improves. I asked Gemini to make me a meme about AI humor, and it spewed out gobbledygook at first. When I told it that it had one last chance, it gave me this:

A flatline of Dad jokes

The big question is: Can AI deliver a comedy masterclass? Well, when it comes to originality, AI struggles. A Google DeepMind study from 2024 found that the jokes AI produced were often flat, more like Dad jokes than clever punchlines. The study also revealed that AI's strategies stifled creativity and often reinforced dominant cultural viewpoints.

When asked to craft original jokes, AI mostly produced predictable results. Take this absurd one, for example:

"I trained an AI to write jokes. Now it won’t stop roasting me in binary."

Not quite ready for stand-up, but I guess – you had to be there.