AI vs people: who makes better jokes?

A study suggests that artificial intelligence could be doing a better job at creating memes.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, LMU Munich, and TU Darmstadt have conducted a study revealing how AI performs at creating humorous content.

The study’s aim was to “explore the potential of LLMs in co-creating memes – a humor-driven and culturally specific form of creative expression.”

The test revealed that the images created by OpenAI's GPT-40 model were somewhat funnier, more creative, and more shareable than those created by humans.

Nevertheless, the study also showed that when it came to the top-performing memes, “human-created ones were better in humor,” also suggesting that memes created by humans in collaboration with AI “stood out in creativity and shareability.”

The research concluded that AI can help its users with productivity and create content that more people could relate to, but human creativity is needed for ideas that others could connect with “on a deeper level.”

With this study, researchers sought to see how AI could benefit its users by performing tasks such as writing jokes.

The study included three groups of 50 people who were given the same task – creating memes. However, the groups were provided with different approaches to completing the task.

The first group had to come up with memes without AI help, while the second group had to create memes with AI assistance, leaving the third group creating memes through AI prompts alone.

The participants were asked to write captions for classic meme templates, including the ones with Fry from Futurama, Doge, Boromir, and more. The participants also had to create memes related to topics of sports, food, and work.

The second set of participants then evaluated the generated images based on how funny, sharable, and creative they were.

The results revealed that “[...] Memes created entirely by AI performed better than both human-only and human-AI collaborative memes in all areas on average.” However, it was also noted that the images found to be the “funniest” were primarily created by humans.

The study once again proved that AI can be used mainly for productivity and as an idea generator that can provide funny concepts relatable to wider audiences. However, when it comes to creating more clever, funnier, and more nuanced jokes, the human brain is irreplaceable.