The Dangerous Economist: “Why did the human stare at the glass of orange juice?” “They were trying to concentrate.”

This reminds me of another joke or pun:

WHAT do you get when you cross a fragrance with an actor?

Answer: a smell Gibson.

The issue is can computers or artificial intelligence (AI) tell jokes and will they replace comedians and comedy writers? This gets at the issue of structural unemployment. One example is when workers are replaced by machines. But sometimes machines or robots complement workers instead of replacing them. Workers are made more productive and the jobs are made easier (some of my related posts listed below discuss this). The NY Times article I link does raise this possibility for comedians and comedy writers.

The joke which is the title of this post was written by AI. It comes from a recent NY Times article (and the Mel Gibson joke comes from a NY Times article in 2013). See In the Battle Between Bots and Comedians, A.I. Is Killing: In roast battles and stage shows, comics are experimenting with ChatGPT and other models. But inspired stand-ups shouldn’t fear for their jobs — yet. by Jason Zinoman of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"His opponent was a ChatGPT-powered version of Sarah Silverman, the comic who, as it happens, had sued the developer behind that chatbot for copyright infringement earlier in the week. On a screen nearby, her head shook back and forth. “Why did the human stare at the glass of orange juice?” it asked in a close approximation of her girlish voice. “They were trying to concentrate.” Then oddly, it proclaimed: “Roasted!”"
"Jimmy Kimmel has told jokes written by ChatGPT on his show in February, and once-cautious computer scientists are now predicting it will only be a matter of years before robots are regularly generating professional comedy."
"It’s worth recalling that in the 1990s, supercomputers lost to chess grandmasters before they started winning. But comedy is not chess. And whether A.I. can intentionally generate truly funny art is as much a philosophical as a technological question."
"Tony Veale, a computer scientist who wrote a book on comedy and A.I., “Your Wit Is My Command,” is impressed with new large-language models’ ability to imitate genre and voice, analyze and generate metaphors, explain itself and even admit mistakes. He’s bullish on computers making professional-level jokes in five years and when asked about originality responded that A.I.’s process isn’t any different from that of young artists. “Many comedians, such as Eddie Murphy and Jerry Seinfeld, trained themselves by repeatedly listening to and repeating Bill Cosby’s early comedy albums,” he wrote in an email. “We all learn from those we aim to emulate and transcend.”"
"On the cutting edge of this work is Joe Toplyn, who studied engineering and edited The Harvard Lampoon before writing jokes for “Late Night With David Letterman,” where he helped come up with the concept of throwing watermelons off a five-story building (a very human idea). Toplyn has created a bot called Witscript that takes a headline or thought and spits out three jokes, then picks the best one.
In a demonstration at a conference last September, he presented two examples of what he considered “human-level” jokes that he claimed would make you chuckle if delivered by a friend. In one, he put in this prompt: “Some casinos are using fine-arts exhibitions to bring in new business” and Witscript responded: “I lost my Monet but gained a Jackson Pollock.” In another, Toplyn typed in “I’m thinking about growing a mustache” and the punchline was: “Tom Selleck called — he wants his look back.”"
"Comics have always been quicker than other artists to experiment with technology — Whitney Cummings had an eerie robot version of herself tell jokes on a Netflix special in 2019 — and most of the half dozen or so I talked to who did use some form of A.I. to make jokes seemed underwhelmed. Bill Oakley is a veteran of “The Simpsons” who, along with Josh Weinstein, produced many classic episodes, including “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” He asked a bot to write an episode in their style. The result, about a bees infestation, was “on the level of a seventh-grade fan,” he said."
"In media and culture today, a greater premium is placed on producing work quickly and in volume, an approach that already benefits computers more than humans."
"Toplyn was part of this wave, publishing a book on how to write late-night jokes. He broke down monologues, desk pieces and parodies with practical theories on how they work. And he used these conclusions to train his bot."
"In an introduction to a new book of poems produced by A.I., “I Am Code,” the poet Eileen Myles is shown the work and finds it badly derivative."
"Rigid characters trying and failing to escape their mechanistic situation is classically funny. (Think of Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears or Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory.) Henri Bergson, one of the first great modern philosophers of humor, who was wise enough to reject “imprisoning the comic spirit in a definition,” saw comedy as a corrective to Industrial Age automatism. He believed that we laughed as a response to people acting like machines."
"Artificial intelligence can come up with jokes, but it can require emotional intelligence to make them work. What makes people crack up is not just the joke but also the connection with a human consciousness telling it."
"Human creativity, he (movie director Jason Woliner) believes, is not replaceable, but it is able to integrate this new technology in exciting, creative ways. With Dale (a crude cowboy robot named Dale using speech-synthesis software and ChatGPT), he found a “a new tone” to play with and plans to continue to work with it."
"The conversation about A.I. today gravitates toward doomsday scenarios, but consider the utopian outcome, that bots don’t replace comics but become useful tools."
"Competition from increasingly clever computer programs will force artists to not only rely more on intuition than imitation, but also to think harder about what makes them, and their work, distinctly human."