Does ChatGPT make the better jokes? Chatbots' humor keeps up with that of humans, according to study
Funny, funnier, ChatGPT? Researchers have compiled funny stories from professionals and amateurs. Compared to a chatbot, they performed surprisingly poorly.
ChatGPT, for example, can keep up with professional satirists when writing headlines, reports a research duo in the journal "PLoS One". And its jokes are perceived as funnier than those devised by average people.
Drew Gorenz and Norbert Schwarz from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles had fed ChatGPT 3.5 with headlines from the popular US satirical magazine "The Onion" and asked it to develop new headlines in the style of the magazine.
A good 200 people were then asked to rate the humor of the headlines. They did not know the source. On average, ChatGPT headlines were found to be just as funny as the originals. Of the four best-rated headlines, two were created by professional authors and two by ChatGPT.
ChatGPT shines with better sayings
In a second experiment, Gorenz and Schwarz had the chatbot and 105 volunteers from the general public complete three tasks, each with three subtasks. The task was to develop funny expressions for common acronyms, funny filler words for cloze texts and humorous sayings inspired by an unpleasant fictional scenario.
Acronyms are words formed from the first letters of several words, EDP for electronic data processing, for example, and Nasa for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. COW, STD and CLAP were given in the study. One presented fill-in-the-blank sentence was: "A lesser-known room in the White House: _____." And one scenario was to respond to the question "So, how was it?" after a friend sang a cringe-worthy song.
In total, there were 945 answers from the 105 participants and 180 from the chatbot, which had to provide 20 humorous answers for each task. A new group of participants then rated the humor of the results on a seven-point scale from "not funny at all" to "very funny".
On average, almost 70% of respondents found the AI-generated comments funnier than those devised by humans. The researchers report that ChatGPT particularly excelled in the scenario responses. Just over 25% rated the remarks written by humans as funnier, while around 5% found both sources equally funny.
Is it getting tight for comedians?
The production of humor is difficult and highly valued, according to the study. According to the study, the most successful stand-up comedians receive 20 million dollars per one-hour show recording. Will this soon be over?
The study shows that "you don't have to feel the emotions that make a good joke in order to tell a really good joke yourself", said Gorenz - himself an amateur comedian. This supports concerns about the threat to entertainment professions from artificial intelligence.
Gorenz and Schwarz are convinced that if chatbots are able to provide services comparable to those of professional writers, this poses a serious employment risk for comedy writers. Further analyses would now have to examine the chatbot potential in writing other commercially successful formats such as screenplays, cartoons and memes.
Virtual artists?
There have already been protests among US Hollywood writers and actors about the perceived existential threat to their professions posed by AI. According to the researchers, the current state of play is that someone can use a chatbot to write a joke and another AI tool to perform it in the voice of a well-known comedian. With newer models for voice and image generation, for example, a completely virtual comedian is also possible in one step.
ChatGPT was presented by OpenAI at the end of 2022. The chatbot can communicate with users via text-based messages and images. It is based on a so-called Large Language Model (LLM), a powerful language model that has been trained with numerous text documents. In addition to this, there are now other generally available chatbots. Such as Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and so on.
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