AI Can Not Write Comedy, And it’s Not a Joke
Look around and see the hot and happening thing that is making tumultuous changes across every facet: Artificial Intelligence (AI). The term, the technology, the ‘next big thing’, got popular enough that even someone under the rock would have heard about it by now. Amid the rapidly increasing capabilities, AI is reckoned to take over writing. So, writers need to pack their bags, move out, and leave their tasks for AI to take care of the chores they were doing to date. No, not exactly, put up your spectacles, and here’s the answer of ‘Why Not?’
Leaving the clutter aside, the most approved image of AI planted in people’s minds was akin to killer robots, changing human reality, affecting or changing our abilities, etc. But the actual attack came from a quite surprising area: the creative field.
The most popular form of AI came in the form of ChatGPT when Sam Altman’s OpenAI launched the AI chatbot in November 2022. Perhaps it was the first readily available AI tool in the public domain that got over 100 million users within a few months.
The point here is that ChatGPT acted as a paradigm shift: people started using AI for creating writing pieces and those who were in the domain already honed their skills with the new tool.
Broader writing community shares this concern that if AI is here to replace writers? Though it needs in-depth analysis and eyes on the development, there is no direct answer to the question.
Imagine a comedian decides to use ChatGPT to make it write a comic script for his upcoming act. Even after putting up correct prompts clear with the demands and pin-pointed commands given to the chatbot, chances are that the comedian might not get satisfied with it.
The chatbots available today follow the large language model (LLM) for training. They have fed gazillions of gigabytes (GB) of data and information. Undoubtedly, the AI bot knows hundreds more words and thousands of different ways to process them. But there will still be uncertainty if it can deliver the jokes right to people.
Aristotle defined comedy as one of the four original genres of literature other than tragedy, epic poetry, and lyric poetry. Who knows if the Greek philosopher would laugh at it if he would have told that something non-human is writing comedy. Not sure if the laugh would be in surprise or disgust.
Comedy has evolved as a literary form and it has been adapted to situations, regions and time.
In modern context, comedy has become more individualistic, concise and personal. One liner comedy gained fame and it needs a connection. For instance, one liners from comedians like Mitch Hedberg or Stewart Francis could have hit the audience’s minds but on an individual level.
“Dogs are forever in the pushup position.” (Mitch Hedberg)
I failed math so many times in school, I can’t even count. (Stewart Francis)
Stand-up comedy today is about spontaneity, observation, and wit. It sometimes even gets dumb just to make people laugh and how can we expect the same with something with Intelligence in their name.
An AI chatbot had read thousands for jokes and comedy scripts and it could create a new one too. But writing comedy is more than just keeping word after word, even if it does so with precision.
Most of them have a knowledge cut-off from a specific time. So it loses the connection with the latest trends and the present context.
Hollywood sci-fi threw an unfriendly picture of AI in front of us, though the bar of fatality got down with time. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator (1984) introduced the threat of AI to capture the whole world and finish the entire human race. Then Keanu Reeves brought up the possibility that artificial intelligence would take over and put people in The Matrix (1999). And recently, Tom Cruise showed in Mission Impossible — Death Reckoning (2023) that the entity is up to becoming sentient and beating humans in their own games.
The threat from AI has gone to a more individual level as well. In a recent talk at the Frontiers Forum event, Yuval Noah Harari strongly put the concern of AI to confiscate human abilities through their operating system for thousands of years: Language.
Summarizing all these things, it boils down that writers have the biggest responsibilities on their shoulders. No matter how advanced the technology gets, it’s going to act as a tool for humans to get better at their chores. Humans created language and all the forms of it. Time will tell if some other human creation is going to contradict one of its greatest inventions.
