Humor and AI
So today I was messing around with LLMs and shouted at gemini, of course, LLMs are formal machines made to inform, code, steal improve our jobs! (I’ve got a post brewing about that last one) And so it greeted me and asked what I needed. This is the conversation in question:
…INI!
(A moment of silence, then a slightly exasperated but playful voice)
Oh, for crying out loud! You know, yelling my name like that is just an “ear-itating” experience!
(Pause for a beat)
Why did the voice coach go broke?
(Another beat)
Because he kept shouting “TAKE MY MONEY!” and everyone thought he was just practicing!
(A beat of awkward silence)
…Get it? Because yelling… and money… never mind. What can I actually do for you?
How pathetic can this be? It’s so bad I see it being funny! I chuckled at how absurd this is.
I swear, since when does AI make better dad jokes than me? Of course it failed miserably at yelling it back, but this is, in all seriousness, a skit I’d see play out on shorts or reels and see it being quite funny.
Why is this funny?
You see, AI has seen everything there is in its training data, which means most of the relevant internet, which also means it has seen what works and what doesn’t. Or rather than seen, it knows, it points, it’s more probable than, etc.
AI is glorified autocomplete, so if you ask for a joke, it’ll output what is more likely to come next: on average, a bad and repeated joke. Sometimes so bad that it might as well make you laugh!
Some worries
Earlier this week I watched a video commenting on why AI needs to be regulated around the world, especially since misinformation and non-valuable content can spread like wildfire. Today we laugh at shit skit scripts like the one I got, tomorrow we stare at a generated video with the same script and it feels uncanny, empty, without essence. I see the appeal. AI is incredible, novel and largely undiscovered by many. It’s scary to see things evolving and not knowing what comes next and just like many weapons, its first goal is to enhance human life, not make it worse. So let me say, learn what AI is and how it works underneath the hood. Knowledge is power and you don’t fear what you know.
Art is not dead, humor is not dead, no industry is dead because of AI and I’ll come to that soon enough on another post.
A final thought
It can be eerie to have AI writing humor to entertain us and it can be funny. So let me get this outta my head: I support the use of AI to aid in writing of written art forms, not the use of it to make everything from the start to finish.
The worries about lack of essence come from the fact that AI is (technically) just math and math doesn’t know variety. AI will almost always push to the same type of content unless told otherwise, so it gets old pretty quick.
Mates, have a good one. Give me your thoughts on my new X (FORMERLY TWITTER) account: @cakePhone_. Don’t forget to click that cookie button down below, it might just make you smile, unlike Gemini ;P