AI asks: Do I amuse you?
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
A few years ago, funny robots seemed like the stuff of sci-fi movies. Now some AI models are trying to get in on the joke.
Why it matters: Bot humor shows AI's growing understanding of culture — but also, its potential impact on creative industries.
The big picture: Humor is complicated. The ability to tell a good joke and appreciate a good joke are different skills. And humor, of course, is subjective.
- But AI development is a desperate race, and jokes are ... well, no joke.
Zoom out: This week Elon Musk posted on X that his Grok chatbot could understand and explain funny memes better than most humans.
- That, too, may be subjective.
By the numbers: According to early research coming in December's Computers in Human Behavior, GPT-4o outperforms humans in text-based humor — but not image-based humor.
- Nearly 70% of participants in a USC study from last year rated ChatGPT's jokes funnier than human jokes. Around 25% preferred human humor and 5% found them equally funny.
Zoom in: AI models can learn joke structure — like a setup and a punchline — and execute humor that might make you lol, but not LOL.
- There's no real way to measure funny. What feels like brilliance to one person can sound like nonsense to another.
- Critics of OpenAI's Sora call its content "AI slop," but the app's top-10 ranking shows audiences are entertained.
Models learn from humorous text, stand-up routines, funny videos, and social chatter on Twitter or Reddit, but they're still liable to create a limited range of humor.
- When Google's Veo 3 video generator launched earlier this year, 404 Media found that when asked to create stand-up clips, it repeatedly produced men telling the same joke.
Case in point: Axios gave ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Meta AI and Grok the prompt, "Tell me the funniest joke you know." They copied each other, insulted babies, and more:
- ChatGPT: A neutron walks into a bar and asks, "How much for a drink?"
The bartender says, "For you, no charge."
- Gemini: A set of three logicians walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "Does everyone here want a drink?" The first logician says, "I don't know." The second logician says, "I don't know." The third logician says, "Yes."
- Claude and Meta AI: A man walked into a library and asked the librarian, "do you have any books on Pavlov's dogs and Schrodinger's cat?" Librarian replies, "it rings a bell, but I'm not sure if it's here or not."
- Grok: A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The driver looks at the kid and says, "Lady, that is the ugliest baby I've ever seen!" She's fuming, storms to the back of the bus, sits down next to a man and says, "That driver just insulted me!" The man hands her his bag of peanuts and says, "Here, have some peanuts. Go yell at him again ... I'll hold your monkey."
The bottom line: As AI improves, it can mimic wit and timing, but not the full nuance and variety of human comedy. Yet.
