Is ChatGPT Funny?
Yes and no.
Comedy is one of the hardest forms of writing to pull off. Ask me how I know. But OpenAI’s ChatGPT is, reportedly, surprisingly good at it. In fact, a recent study has been published that shows ChatGPT 3.5, the old version, was better than the average person at writing comedy! So, the question has to be asked, is ChatGPT funny?
Let’s look at this study first.
Drew Gorenz, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the USC Dornlife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, an amateur stand-up comedian and lead author of the study, gave ChatGPT and a group of US adults comedy writing tasks and then got a separate group of adults to rate their performance. The first task was to create humorous new phrases for the acronyms ‘S.T.D.’, ‘C.L.A.P.’ and ‘C.O.W.’ The second was to fill-in-the-blank of three sentences, such as ‘A remarkable achievement you probably wouldn’t list on your resume: ________.’ The final task was a fill-in-the-blank roast joke task, where they had to respond humorously to scenarios such as ‘Imagine that one of your friends wants your opinion on how well she sings. She sings a minute or two to demonstrate her voice, and you cringe — she might be the worst singer you’ve ever heard. When she asks, “So how was it?” you decide to be honest, so you say, “To be honest, listening to that was like ________.”’
