AI can successfully entrain a preschool child with its complete collection of dad jokes known to humankind. Yet how do you make it create something really funny? It knows all the puns that people have already put together and probably knows the algorithms for making a new one. Will it be fun? Who knows, but you can try.
It's not an easy task. AI writing jokes and responding to the audience's reactions has been a holy grail for engineers for a lot of reasons, including art for art's sake. Along with more mundane tasks, like turning AI into an essay writer free helper or a personal assistant that can lend you a hand with writing theology research proposals, people were always intrigued by the ultimate test of AI's ability to understand and emulate humans – telling a good joke.
Can AI be funny?
AI can amuse. It knows how to make knock-knock jokes. It knows responses to all the "Why did the chicken cross the road?" type of jokes. Yet, can it generate something that will make you smile?
Of course, it's not only about the content that AI can access – it's also about the training and patterns. ChatGPT was designed to... well, chat. It's conversational but mainly aims to be helpful, not funny or sarcastic. However, some more targeted attempts were made by data scientists, comedians, journalists, and AI enthusiasts from the general public to train various models in the art of funny.
For example, there is Jon the Robot, a performing android, which is part of an experiment by Naomi Fitter, an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. Jon the Robot learns how to respond to its audience: it varies the timing of its delivery based on the length of laughter and gives different responses by the level of noise in the room (either roars of laughter or "crickets"). Jon gets both, just as a human newbie comic would.
Joe Toplyn, a comedy writer with four Emmys under his belt for his work for The Late Show With David Letterman and The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, insists that comedy is about tried and true formulas and if you crack the code, you can make AI funny too. He published a book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV: How to Write Monologue Jokes, Desk Pieces, Sketches, Parodies, Audience Pieces, Remotes, and Other Short-Form Comedy and recently came up with an idea for Witscript – a joke-generating system that should detect keywords to suggest relevant punch line. He sees his work with AI as a continuation of his work as a writer. He doesn't fear that AI will take his job. Instead, he believes it will help him in his mission: make people feel less lonely with shared humor – even if they share a joke with a chatbot.
Finally, there is Punchlines.AI, built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and, according to its creator @brensudol, "fine-tuned on thousands of late-night comedy monologue jokes." You can add an opening line, and it will provide several punch-line options it considers funny. Most of them are – only not in "ha-ha" funny, but "weird" funny. Still, early days.
How to create funny prompts for AI?
The best result you can get is by improvising and trying to create something new and interesting for yourself personally (just as it is with topics for your essays). So, I am somewhat skeptical about the "funny AI prompt collections" that circle the web. As a rule, those presets are nothing more than the first lines straight from the corny jokes' Hall of Fame, which might get an odd chuckle out of you but mostly would make an eight-year-old cover her face to hide the cringe. Instead, I suggest you create your own prompts following these simple guidelines.
- Prime it with a joke
If you are working not with a dedicated system pre-trained to give answers that are supposed to be funny, you should first set the tone. For example, when I opened a general-purpose ChatGPT dialogue, I started by asking whether it knew what a "knock-knock" joke was and exchanging a few classics in the genre with it. Then, I asked it, "Why don't cats rule the planet?" and it replied, "Because they haven't mastered the art of herding humans yet!" accompanied by two smiling cats and a planet emoji. From the previous dialogue, AI figured out that I was not looking for serious answers but instead wanted to have fun, so it delivered a joke answer. For comparison, if you ask ChatGPT the same question in a dialogue primed to be educational and informative, it will, in all seriousness, give you a list of reasons, including details on social structure, communication, technology, cultural complexity, and leadership traits that cats apparently lack. By the way, when I asked Punchlines.AI the same question, it gave me the following options:
- Because they're allergic to dogs.
- Because "The Planet of the Cats" doesn't sound as scary as "The Planet of the Apes."
- Because their thumbs are on the wrong side.
I'd say that being primed the right way, general-purpose AI can be funnier than the specialized "funny AI." Which one did you like best?
- Give it a reference to what you find funny
Humor, of course, is highly subjective. Some like slapstick comedy, some enjoy Oscar Wilde's witticisms, and some are hard into Monty Pythonesque absurdity. If you want AI to be funny for you, set your expectations. You can feed it some of the jokes that made you laugh recently or make a reference to some of your favorite comedians. For example, tell it to answer you as George Carlin.
Of course, this is not a perfect recipe. For example, Vulture conducted an experiment where they asked AI to come up with snippets of stand-up routines in the style of popular comedians: Gary Gulman, Maria Bamford, W. Kamau Bell, Atsuko Okatsuka, Pete Holmes, and Vir Das. Then, they asked the role models themselves what they thought of the results. The good thing is that every one of them has found the result at least somewhat funny, even if dated and not edgy enough: passable for conversation, good enough for a kid, open-mic level, or better than "some comedians." The bad news is that they didn't recognize their style and said AI sounded like a "60-year-old white man" or "the vice president of sales at your company." Maybe AI just didn't have enough transcripts of their performances? This only proves my point – feed it more references.
- Give AI a theme
Okay, AI knows you want a joke from it and knows which flavor of jokes you prefer. Now do what they do during improvisations: give it a theme, a premise, a place, a character – anything to start spinning yarn. If you don't introduce some spontaneity, AI will replicate something you already heard, and that's hardly funny. Okay, some jokes are funny every time, but they are rare gems, don't expect AI to run before it can walk.
For example, I asked it to write me a joke about a lusty baker in Hull (if you get it, we are automatically friends, I love you! Everyone who finds The Goes Wrong Show hilarious is my favorite human being). Despite being rather formulaic and following a pattern of "Why did X always Y?" it did manage to reference "irresistible buns," so I'd call it a success.
Care to try how good AI can be at humor with the right prompt?
Sample AI funny prompts to try out
To get funny responses from any AI, you can try the following approaches:
- Ask it for classic jokes
AI knows all about classic joke structures like the knock-knock jokes, "X and Y walk into a bar," or "Why did X do Y." Just give it a subject you want to laugh at right now. For example, "Write me a joke about a physicist and a poet walking into a bar."
- Outlandish scenarios
Take a hypothetical or absurd scenario and ask AI to elaborate on that. For example, ask, "What would happen if we woke up in a world where dogs can talk?"
- Wordplay
Ask AI for wordplay, puns, riddles, or tongue twisters. For example, "Can you come up with a tongue twister about rollerblading and Rolls-Royce?" If it isn't funny just yet, it will soon get increasingly hilarious as you try to pronounce it at speed.
- Storytelling
Ask AI to make up a humorous story or an exchange with a quirky premise of your choosing, for example: "Write me a funny dialogue between a cheerful toaster and a grumpy coffee maker."
- Childlike curiosity
Ask any question that comes to your mind. Let your inner child have the driver's seat. Remember how adults told you to stop asking silly questions? With AI, you don't have to stop. For example, "If week had 10 days instead of 7, what names would days have?" or "If you were a superhero with a silly and useless power, what would it be?"
- Cultural mashups
Sometimes, the "funny" factor emerges when you combine two things seemingly on opposite sides of the cultural spectrum, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. You can find hilarity in creating this type of contrast in your prompt, such as "If Edgar Allan Poe described queuing at Starbucks in the morning, what would it sound like?"
- Top 10 lists
Everyone loves listicles, but honestly, they have become kind of silly. How about taking it to the next level and asking AI to create a list on some absurd subject, for example, "10 reasons why aliens visiting Earth would pretend to be cows."
- Character voice
This is good advice for every purpose, but it works for funny content, too. Tell AI how to respond and who to impersonate in its answers. For example, "Tell me why I always lose my one sock in the drier as if you were Doc Brown" or "Answer to me as a sarcastic and evil AI would. Don't give me the right answers."
- Exaggeration and hyperbole
Taking things to the extremes often produces a comic effect. Encourage fun responses by asking questions like "What is the most complicated, over-the-top way to brew a cup of tea?"
- Absurd comparison
This sounds a bit like a typical job interview question for a Silicon Valley startup in the early noughties, but weren't those hilarious? Request comparisons between unrelated things in a humorous way, for example, "Compare a hatchet to a rubber duck amusingly" or "What is the difference between a pen and a rollercoaster ride?"
- Role reversal
Flipping the roles has been a source of amusement for millennia. You can ask for such a scenario from AI, for example, "Imagine if toddlers were to take care and be in charge of their parent's life, how would a breakfast look?"
- Everyday annoyance
Something regularly spoils your fun? Task AI to deal with it. For example, "What can I do to make people respect my personal space on a crowded bus?" or "What shall I do with a type of hair that doesn't want to be either wavy or straight?" Don't forget to add "Answer unseriously" to your query. AI's have a tendency to go all educational on you otherwise.
- Rap battles
Wouldn't it be funny to hear some unlikely characters exchanging blows and sick burns? How about a rap battle between Mozart and Billie Eilish or between Cleopatra and Kim Kardashian?
- Unusual product reviews
This is a comical genre of its own that thrives on Amazon. Still, with AI, you can invent a product or even suggest a reviewer's personality. For example, "Write a humorous Amazon-style review for a vampire sunscreen lotion from a dissatisfied customer."
- Bizarre competitions
Granted, there are enough weird competitions that actually exist and occasionally make their way into The Guinness Book of Records, you can still have fun inventing one or two more and ask AI to write a commentary on this imaginary event. You can specify contestants and a presenter too. For example, "Write a sporting event commentary for an underwater hockey match between the teams of octopi and hip-hop performers, narrated by Bender from Futurama."
- Mondegreens
Everyone has a hilarious story about a misheard line from a popular song that changed the meaning to a very unexpected effect. Why not play with that? Feed comically misinterpreted lyrics to AI and ask it to continue the song. For example, ask it for lyrics to a Bob Dylan song with a chorus that goes like "The ants are my friends, they're blowin' in the wind" (yeah… that's what I heard instead of "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind," but in my defense, I was like 7).
- Imaginary inventions
You can ask AI for very formal and serious-sounding descriptions of the most absurd and useless inventions, for example, "Write a user manual for a self-cooking spatula" or "Create a patent application for a reverse umbrella that keeps you dry from above."
- Historical reinterpretations
Sometimes, the names for historical events just don't match the things they describe and simply beg for alternative interpretations – AI can do that for you. Ask it for a retelling with a twist, for example: "Give me a funny and wrong version of the Boston Tea Party events" or "How would historical records of the War of Roses look like if it actually were about roses."
- Influencer posts
Celebrities and influencers are active on social media – and we are grateful because they give us some fodder for conversation on slow news days. And even if this well of entertainment has dried out, you can generate some influencer content yourself. For example, "Write a script for a make-up tutorial video that Morticia Addams would post on TikTok" or "Write a home-improvement hacks blog from Hulk."
- Funny definitions
Finally, you can ask AI for amusing definitions of any ordinary object, word, or phrase, for example, "How would a seventeenth-century English aristocrat define "lunch break"?" or "Define dystopia in a wrong and funny way."
Mix and tune these approaches to generate funny responses because experimentation is the key to any great result – humor is no exception.
Need some giggles right now?
Of course, comical and funny is still purely human domain, and the funniest jokes are those that hit close to home and make you a bit uncomfortable because they target fears, pains, and insecurities. I am not sure AI can understand all this – or if it does, I am not sure I'd be comfortable with that. Anyway, nothing prevents you from playing with this new toy to take your mind off your next submission deadline. Sometimes, AI's jokes are okay, and sometimes, they are so bad that they are good again. Stay creative and have fun!
