Live data from Hacker News

ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

nautil.us

21–30 of 74 posts

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#21
post #7

ChatGPT is funnier than you *unless you want politically insensitive jokes.

Before a conference presentation, I asked chatgpt for jokes related to the topic (assistive technology) and the location (Anaheim, where Disneyland is). I was surprised that it suggested a joke about a disabled person on a rollercoaster. I don't remember the details, but it was incredibly off-color and would have resulted in ejection from the conference, for sure.

> it was incredibly off-color and would have resulted in ejection from the conference, for sure.

So it was hilarious? An unchained LLM should be able to write some doozies.

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#22
post #16

If/when generative AI gets good at jokes, it's going to cause a big change in how people react to humorous utterances. If gmail can nudge you to insert jokes at the drop of a hat, anyone can be funny on email. If a Google Glass-like device (or even just AirPods Pro+) can listen to your conversation and prompt you with a joke to make, then anyone can be funny IRL. It will cheapen humor, or at least the kind of humor t…

I don’t think that will happen. You can fake almost anything, but you can’t fake funny.

I'm one of those people who is mostly not-funny, but is occasionally quite funny. I think that if I were given timely material, I could execute it well. I think this would work best with one-liners, where there's less of a need to get the timing right between sentences.

For example, if you'd been having a conversation about Topic A, then later Topic B, and there was a joke involving a double meaning of a word that relates to both A and B. Wrap that up in a one-liner, put it on a Google Glass, and a decent number of people could deliver it well enough to get a laugh.

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#23

If/when generative AI gets good at jokes, it's going to cause a big change in how people react to humorous utterances. If gmail can nudge you to insert jokes at the drop of a hat, anyone can be funny on email. If a Google Glass-like device (or even just AirPods Pro+) can listen to your conversation and prompt you with a joke to make, then anyone can be funny IRL. It will cheapen humor, or at least the kind of humor t…

Half of comedy (and nearly anything else) is timing. Having a model prompt in realtime will still result in awkwardly timed/delivery of jokes

Yeah, I could imagine a prompting system that had you reading off a teleprompter, basically. You wouldn't even know how the joke ends until you got to the end of it. If you had faith in the AI, you could just say whatever it printed, knowing that you'd get a laugh at the end. Dangerous!

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#24

It was super buried, having to find the link to the paper [1] to the data [2] but finally found the document with the actual ChatGPT satirical Onion-style headlines [3]. The full list of 20 results, which it seems criminal that the article didn't include or link to directly so we can judge for ourselves: 1. "Local Man Discovers New Emotion, Still Can't Describe It Properly" 2. "Woman Declares Herself Mayor of 'Laundr…

These aren't that funny...

I would even go so far as to say they are pretty bad.

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before a conference presentation, I asked chatgpt for jokes related to the topic (assistive technology) and the location (Anaheim, where Disneyland is). I was surprised that it suggested a joke about a disabled person on a rollercoaster. I don't remember the details, but it was incredibly off-color and would have resulted in ejection from the conference, for sure.

> it was incredibly off-color and would have resulted in ejection from the conference, for sure. So it was hilarious? An unchained LLM should be able to write some doozies.

It wasn't hilarious, but it was more of a "joke" than many of the duds it delivered. I didn't end up using any of the jokes, but rather made a meta-joke about how I had asked chatgpt for jokes and had come up completely dry.

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#26
post #16

If/when generative AI gets good at jokes, it's going to cause a big change in how people react to humorous utterances. If gmail can nudge you to insert jokes at the drop of a hat, anyone can be funny on email. If a Google Glass-like device (or even just AirPods Pro+) can listen to your conversation and prompt you with a joke to make, then anyone can be funny IRL. It will cheapen humor, or at least the kind of humor t…

I don’t think that will happen. You can fake almost anything, but you can’t fake funny.

In real life it's hard to tell. On the internet of course you can fake funny. Evidence: top comments on reddit.

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#27
This is the actual point of AI right?

The point of AI, to tune and refine everything to be objectively better than humans in every possible respect, basically just to see what that looks like, and then potentially reap the economic benefits of this betterment ?

I saw someone on here being excited about when robots can beat humans at soccer, I know we can do this, and I know this will happen, and I guess that's the point, we just want to see what happens. But I personally don't really understand the appeal. People play soccer to win, sure, but they also play for fun.

Being funny is like this too, it's fun. Asking ChatGPT to write a joke for you doesn't seem fun.

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#28

One of my few hobbies is writing standup comedy jokes. To give you some insight into my style, here is non-offensive joke: I recently bought myself a do it yourself boat kit from Amazon. Haven’t finished assembling it yet. Just need to add water. Anyhow, I’ve really tried to use multiple models to aide in writing but they fall short. Mostly due to comedy being a performance art. You can try and write a joke in the st…

This would actually work well, but you'd have to be Steven Wright.

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#29
post #16

If/when generative AI gets good at jokes, it's going to cause a big change in how people react to humorous utterances. If gmail can nudge you to insert jokes at the drop of a hat, anyone can be funny on email. If a Google Glass-like device (or even just AirPods Pro+) can listen to your conversation and prompt you with a joke to make, then anyone can be funny IRL. It will cheapen humor, or at least the kind of humor t…

I don’t think that will happen. You can fake almost anything, but you can’t fake funny.

That sounds a bit silly. Why can't funny be "faked?" Plenty of successful comedians practiced and had to learn to be funny. So there's clearly a method to it.

Re: ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You

#30

One of my few hobbies is writing standup comedy jokes. To give you some insight into my style, here is non-offensive joke: I recently bought myself a do it yourself boat kit from Amazon. Haven’t finished assembling it yet. Just need to add water. Anyhow, I’ve really tried to use multiple models to aide in writing but they fall short. Mostly due to comedy being a performance art. You can try and write a joke in the st…

Comedians practice and code review their art with each other. And in review, they critique and improve their performances. the performance is probably the last 10% that takes another 90% of the time to master. So I get why most folks wouldn't want to spend the time.
Post reply on HN