A USC study finds that (some people think) AI is as funny as the average person.

A new study out of USC compared comedy writing by humans to comedy writing generated by ChatGPT, and found that “ChatGPT can produce written humor at a quality that exceeds laypeople’s abilities and equals some professional comedy writers.” But their experiments didn’t fully convince me that your next favorite joke will be generated by a program. The study involved two experiments. The first asked a group of adults to generate punchlines for three different prompts: writing funny phrases to fit a provided acronym; finishing Apples-To-Apples -style phrases like, “A remarkable achievement you probably wouldn’t list on your resume: ________”; and coming up with “roast” punchlines like, “To be honest, listening to you sing was like ________.” ChatGPT completed the same tasks, and then a separate group of people rated the human and computer results. The evaluating group thought the computer did a little better: “ChatGPT’s responses were rated funnier than the human responses, with 69.5% of participants preferring them (26.5% preferred the human responses, and 4.0% thought both were equally funny).” I don’t doubt that some people found things that a computer generated to be funny, but the experiment seems far too constrained to demonstrate much: using a game of MadLibs with pre-existing formats is hardly a demonstration of creativity. More importantly, I think there’s a more compelling way of reading these study results: the average person off the street isn’t funnier than predictive text. This conclusion tracks for me—I don’t think it’s a particularly hot take to say that most people aren’t funny. Writing comedy is very, very hard and not the kind of thing an average person is going to be able to do well or consistently. Even the most seasoned comedy writer will tell you that joke-writing is a volume game: most of what a funny person writes will not be funny. The second experiment by the USC scholars involved using 50 Onion headlines to generate 20 new Onion headlines, and then asking a group to rate all 70: Those who self-reported seeking out comedy more and reading more satirical news rated the headlines as funnier, […]

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