Can AI Be Funny?

In the midst of the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike (I wrote about this here), there's a topic that's becoming impossible to ignore: the role of AI in creative fields, specifically comedy writing. Amid a landscape defined by labor disputes, residuals from streaming media, and a push for fairness in employment terms, an unexpected player has entered the ring: artificial intelligence.

Copyright is a major concern with AI, but so is job replacement. Creativity is a very complicated subject, and suggesting that a machine today can’t be “creative” is as much a matter of definition as it is of subjectivity.

But humor? Everyone can agree on whether something is funny or not, right?

Right?

Let’s Ask the Question Anyway

ChatGPT is an incredible writing aid. If you’re a writer, you can have it read your work and instantly tell you if there are plot inconsistencies, literary devices that have been used so much in the past that they sound like another author, and so on. A list of thoughts can…