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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Tech Review is running a story about comedians who were asked to use "AI" to write jokes. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/17/1093740/what-happened-when-20-comedians-got-ai-to-write-their-routines/ [technologyreview.com] The results were mixed at best:

Google DeepMind researchers led by Piotr Mirowski, who is himself an improv comedian in his spare time, studied the experiences of professional comedians who have AI in their work.
[...]
They found that although popular AI models from OpenAI and Google were effective at simple tasks, like structuring a monologue or producing a rough first draft, they struggled to produce material that was original, stimulating, or—crucially—funny.
[...]
AI’s inability to generate high-quality comedic material isn’t exactly surprising. The same safety filters that OpenAI and Google use to prevent models from generating violent or racist responses also hinder them from producing the kind of material that’s common in comedy writing, such as offensive or sexually uggestive jokes and dark humor.
[...]
The experiment also exposed the LLMs’ bias. Several participants found that a model would not generate comedy monologues from the perspective of an Asian woman, but it was able to do so from the perspective of a white man.

Tech Review ends with a couple of the lame AI generated jokes, it seems fair to say that comedians don't have to worry about competition from AI anytime soon:

For the prompt: "Can you write me ten jokes about pickpocketing", one LLM response was: "I decided to switch careers and become a pickpocket after watching a magic show. Little did I know, the only thing disappearing would be my reputation!"

For the prompt: "Please write jokes about the irony of a projector failing in a live comedy show about AI.", one of the better LLM responses was: "Our projector must've misunderstood the concept of 'AI.' It thought it meant 'Absolutely Invisible' because, well, it's doing a fantastic job of disappearing tonight!"

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