2024-07-08 16:19:17
Funny, funnier, ChatGPT? Researchers have collected jokes from professionals and amateurs. Compared to the chatbot, they performed surprisingly poorly.
- Study: ChatGPT headlines rated as funny as those from professional writers.
- ChatGPT is rated better than humans in another comedy test.
- AI could pose serious competition for comedy writers.
Chatbots have no emotions – but they may still have the better jokes up their sleeve. ChatGPT, for example, can keep up with professional satire writers when it comes to writing headlines, reports a research duo in the journal “PLoS One”. And its jokes are perceived as funnier than those thought up by average people.
Drew Gorenz and Norbert Schwarz from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles fed ChatGPT 3.5 with headlines from the popular US satirical magazine “The Onion” and asked it to develop new headlines in the style of the magazine.
Then, around 200 people were asked to rate the humor of the headlines. They did not know the source. On average, ChatGPT headlines were found to be just as funny as the originals. Of the four best-rated headlines, two were written by professional writers and two by ChatGPT.
In a second experiment, Gorenz and Schwarz had the chatbot and 105 volunteers from the average population complete three tasks, each with three subtasks. The task was to develop funny expressions for common acronyms, funny filler words for gap-filling texts, and funny sayings inspired by an unpleasant fictional scenario.
Acronyms are words that are formed from the first letters of several words, for example, EDV for electronic data processing and NASA for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In the study, COW, STD and CLAP were specified.
One filler sentence presented was: “A lesser-known room in the White House: _____.” And one scenario prompt was to answer the question “So, how was it?” after listening to a friend sing awful songs.
In total, 945 answers were given by the 105 participants and 180 by the chatbot, which was asked to provide 20 humorous answers for each task. A new group of participants then rated the funniness of the results on a seven-point scale from “not funny at all” to “very funny”.
On average, almost 70 percent of respondents found the comments created by the AI funnier than those created by humans. ChatGPT particularly excelled in the scenario responses, the researchers report. Just over 25 percent rated the comments written by humans as funnier, and around five percent found both sources equally funny.
- Also read: Use ChatGPT for free: How it works
The production of humor is difficult and highly valued, as the study states. The most successful stand-up comedians receive $20 million per one-hour show recording. Could this soon be over?
The study shows that “you don’t have to feel the emotions that make up a good joke to tell a really good joke yourself,” said Gorenz, himself an amateur comedian. This supports concerns about the threat posed to entertainment professions by artificial intelligence.
If chatbots are able to deliver comparable performance to professional writers, this poses a serious employment risk for comedy writers, Gorenz and Schwarz are convinced. Further analyses must now examine the chatbot potential in writing other commercially successful formats such as screenplays, cartoons and memes.
There have already been protests among US Hollywood writers and actors because of the perceived existential threat to their professions posed by AI. The current situation is that someone can use a chatbot to write a joke and another AI tool to deliver it in the voice of a well-known comedian, according to the researchers. With newer models for voice and image generation, for example, a completely virtual comedian is also possible in one step.
ChatGPT was introduced at the end of 2022 by the US company OpenAI. The chatbot can communicate with users via text-based messages and images. The basis is a so-called Large Language Model, a powerful language model that has been trained with numerous text documents. In addition to this, there are now other generally available chatbots.