Can AI master comedy? Researchers train robots in stand-up while comedians use AI as creative tool

A robot walks into a bar: can a Melbourne researcher get AI to do comedy?

Machines can be funny when they mistakenly bump into things - but standup is a tough gig even for humans Robots can make humans laugh - mostly when they fall over - but a new research project is looking at whether robots using AI could ever be genuinely funny. If you ask ChatGPT for a funny joke, it will serve you up something that belongs in a Christmas cracker: "Why don't skeletons fight each other? Because they don't have the guts." The University of Melbourne's Dr Robert Walton, a dean's research fellow in the faculty of fine arts and music, is taking a different approach to working out whether robots can do comedy. Thanks to an Australian Research Council grant of about $500,000, he will train a swarm of robots in standup. And, at least in the beginning, they won't use words. "Robots are good at making people laugh ... they are humorous because they break and they bump into things, and so we're laughing at them," Walton says. "However, when they try to do something funny on purpose, it ain't so funny any more. We don't laugh at them because we really, deep down, don't believe that they can be funny." Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey said exactly that at this year's Edinburgh comedy festival. AI is "unable to be funny", she said. But what Walton is looking at is not AI based on text or large language models. He is going to start with non-verbal communication, something that has to be performed rather than written. The fundamentals of comedy, he says, are timing, reading the room, the connection with the audience, along with physical comedy such as clowning. So his ensemble of about 10 robots - which will not be androids but ground vehicles between 40cm and 2 metres tall - will work with humans to learn how to be funny visually in the first instance. They'll sense movement, the way a head tilts, or when someone laughs. "We're giving these systems more senses, like human senses ... giving them ears, not just listening for words but for things like the gaps in between words, the rhythms of things," he says. He likens them to babies who don't yet know how to make sense of the inputs. "That's partly what we're trying to do with machine learning and AI - giving it more ways to sense and more ways to build a more holistic understanding of what it means to be in the world," he says. "It is in standup comedy, really, that the connection between the robot and the audience is so clear, and there's so much feedback going on." Asked if eventually they will add voices, Walton says "potentially". "Depends how we go," he adds. There is a tension here, as the performance industry is just one of those where jobs are threatened by AI, and AI steals creative content. Walton's project is not about creating robots that will take over comedy festivals, though, but about investigating whether believable comedy is something robots can be taught, to better understand how machines might use both humour and manipulation, and to better understand human-robot interactions and their risks and benefits. A paradox at the heart of his work, Walton says, is that humour can be used to disarm a situation but can also be used coercively. He says it might be interesting for comedians to work with robots with comedic timing, but the same techniques could be used, for example, by care robots that can learn to say the right thing at the right time to cheer people up. "But while I'm looking into this work of building belief in comedy performance by machines, I've got this other eye on what does it mean, and how might this be used coercively?" he says. Many doubt whether that first step, making robots funny, is possible. At this year's G'Day USA arts gala, Australian comedian and polymath Tim Minchin told the crowd that humans are interested in "the agency of their fellow human behind the art, struggling, striving, making choices and errors". "AI might come for the perfectible stuff but never for our flaws," he says. "Our flaws are our humanity." The director of the Melbourne comedy festival, Susan Provan, says what makes comedy enjoyable is "the authentic human originality". "A performer is bringing something only they can bring, because they are bringing their individual lived experience to the material," she says. "What's funny is something that comes from a moment, a magic moment, a pause, an interaction with an audience member, an idea that connects or doesn't connect. "You'd be laughing at the robot stuffing up. That's what would be funny."

Will chatbots ever be funny? Why these comedians aren't worried about an AI takeover, yet

Although comedian Jon Lajoie uses AI in his work, he says AI chatbots aren't 'inherently funny.' A baby and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio. "Welcome to the talking baby podcast," says the infant, wearing headphones and sounding like a deep-voiced radio broadcaster. "On today's episode, we'll be talking to the weird-looking person who lives at my house." So begins a series of humorous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that's attracted millions of views on social media. They're a nod to the 1989 movie "Look Who's Talking" but produced in a matter of hours and without a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget. AI helped do all of that, but it didn't craft the punch lines. It's a relief to comedian Jon Lajoie, who made the videos, that AI chatbots just aren't "inherently funny." "It can't write comedy," said Lajoie. "It can't do any of that." For now, at least, they won't take his job. Lajoie's viral videos have gained him attention as an AI-adopting entertainer that's he's not entirely comfortable with as he grapples with what all this means for the future of his very human craft of making people laugh. King Willonius is not feeling so cautious. His first big hit was an AI-generated song called "BBL Drizzy" that made fun of rapper Drake during the height of his feud with Kendrick Lamar. He's since moved into making AI video parodies like "I'm McLovin It (Popeye's Diss Song)" and "I Want My Barrel Back (Cracker Barrel song)." "It's very similar to somebody who's writing for The Onion or SNL," Willonius said. "I try to find out, OK, what's my comedic angle on this particular topic? And then I'll generate a video from that." He starts with writing his own notes on an idea, then refines it with a chatbot, and puts that language -- known as a prompt -- into AI tools that can generate imagery, video, music and voices. The key, he says, is to keep iterating. But he wouldn't just ask it for a joke -- Willonius says most chatbot-generated comedy lacks the "nuances or complexities that it takes for jokes to really land." A scholar of comedy, Michelle Robinson, said "a lot of the stuff that I've seen AI produce is corny as hell." "It does seem fluent in the basic grammar of jokes, but sometimes they're slightly off," said Robinson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They may be moderately funny, but I think they're really missing an important element of what makes us laugh." What are they missing? She's not totally sure, except that most good jokes are a little edgy or dangerous and chatbots can't seem to calibrate "whatever provocation is in the joke to the moment that we're living in." Caleb Warren, a professor who studies marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona, said that leaves comedy writers with an opportunity to make use of tools that can't completely outsource their skills. "The ideas that are driving the humor are coming from the human comedian," but the AI tools can help them execute and illustrate them, Warren said. Willonius was a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with AI during Hollywood's actor and writer strikes in 2023. "I leaned all the way into AI because I didn't know what else to do with my free time," he said. "I was doing everything I could to try to break into Hollywood. And once the writers' strike happened, that kind of shut that down. I started to learn these AI tools and get really good at them and started to cultivate an audience." While Willonius saw an opening, the rise of generative AI has stoked division and posed challenges to other professional comedians. Sarah Silverman joined book authors in suing leading chatbot makers, alleging they infringed the copyright of her "The Bedwetter" memoir. The daughter of the late Robin Williams called it "gross" and "maddening" when users of OpenAI's AI video generator Sora conjured up realistic "deepfakes" of the beloved actor to churn out what she described as "horrible TikTok slop puppeteering." "You're not making art, you're making disgusting, overprocessed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs-up and like it," Zelda Williams wrote in October. And the estate of legendary comic George Carlin last year settled a lawsuit against podcasters who purportedly cloned his voice to make a fake hourslong comedy special. Comics have also relished mocking AI tools. A recent "South Park" episode called "Sora Not Sorry" had a bumbling police detective investigate a scourge of fake videos. Lajoie, known for his work on the TV series "The League" and comic songs on YouTube, tried to see what would happen if he asked ChatGPT to help craft a bizarre movie script idea. He said it gave him something "super boring" about "grandma's dentures and a talking raccoon." "That level of human creativity, it can't mimic -- yet -- or at least maybe I'm not great at prompting," he said. Instead, he found it useful to cheaply animate ideas he would otherwise never have pursued -- such as the talking baby, birds wearing jeans, or a podcasting Jesus Christ interviewing an Easter Bunny who's never heard of him. The prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invited Lajoie and Willonius to exhibit their video creations this fall at a new AI gallery space in Manhattan, part of a promotion of AI creativity tool startups that the firm invests in. Willonius obliged. Lajoie ended up bowing out, after an interview with The Associated Press in which he voiced doubts about what he described as AI's "Napster phase." The music-sharing website shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations. The investment firm's co-founder, Marc Andreessen, has been bullish about AI's potential to bring new life into filmmaking and comedy. On a November podcast, he blamed Hollywood opposition to its adoption on "woke activists (who) have picked up AI as the new thing they're going to agitate about." He compared it to resistance to computer graphics in movies before they became commonplace. Lajoie said he shared his early AI video experiments with a few friends who are "anti-AI; real, real, anti-AI" and they were surprised by how well the sketches retained Lajoie's own comedic voice. He insists he's no AI expert, just "a creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other." But even editing the sketches requires understanding comedic timing, and he has no interest in ceding that part to a machine. "The thing with comedy is it's so related to performance, delivery and point of view," Lajoie said. "Do AIs have a point of view? They can grab a few points of view from different people." "And when it does have a point of view, I think that's when we all should be afraid for all of the reasons that the Terminator has taught us," he said.

Can AI ever be funny? Some comedians embrace AI tools but they're still running the show

A baby and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio. "Welcome to the talking baby podcast," says the infant, wearing headphones and sounding like a deep-voiced radio broadcaster. "On today's episode, we'll be talking to the weird-looking person who lives at my house." So begins a series of humorous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that's attracted millions of views on social media. They're a nod to the 1989 movie "Look Who's Talking" but produced in a matter of hours and without a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget. AI helped do all of that, but it didn't craft the punch lines. It's a relief to comedian Jon Lajoie, who made the videos, that AI chatbots just aren't "inherently funny." "It can't write comedy," said Lajoie. "It can't do any of that." For now, at least, they won't take his job. Lajoie's viral videos have gained him attention as an AI-adopting entertainer that's he's not entirely comfortable with as he grapples with what all this means for the future of his very human craft of making people laugh. King Willonius is not feeling so cautious. His first big hit was an AI-generated song called "BBL Drizzy" that made fun of rapper Drake during the height of his feud with Kendrick Lamar. He's since moved into making AI video parodies like "I'm McLovin It (Popeye's Diss Song)" and "I Want My Barrel Back (Cracker Barrel song)." "It's very similar to somebody who's writing for The Onion or SNL," Willonius said. "I try to find out, OK, what's my comedic angle on this particular topic? And then I'll generate a video from that." He starts with writing his own notes on an idea, then refines it with a chatbot, and puts that language -- known as a prompt -- into AI tools that can generate imagery, video, music and voices. The key, he says, is to keep iterating. But he wouldn't just ask it for a joke -- Willonius says most chatbot-generated comedy lacks the "nuances or complexities that it takes for jokes to really land." A scholar of comedy, Michelle Robinson, said "a lot of the stuff that I've seen AI produce is corny as hell." "It does seem fluent in the basic grammar of jokes, but sometimes they're slightly off," said Robinson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They may be moderately funny, but I think they're really missing an important element of what makes us laugh." What are they missing? She's not totally sure, except that most good jokes are a little edgy or dangerous and chatbots can't seem to calibrate "whatever provocation is in the joke to the moment that we're living in." Caleb Warren, a professor who studies marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona, said that leaves comedy writers with an opportunity to make use of tools that can't completely outsource their skills. "The ideas that are driving the humor are coming from the human comedian," but the AI tools can help them execute and illustrate them, Warren said. Willonius was a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with AI during Hollywood's actor and writer strikes in 2023. "I leaned all the way into AI because I didn't know what else to do with my free time," he said. "I was doing everything I could to try to break into Hollywood. And once the writers' strike happened, that kind of shut that down. I started to learn these AI tools and get really good at them and started to cultivate an audience." While Willonius saw an opening, the rise of generative AI has stoked division and posed challenges to other professional comedians. Sarah Silverman joined book authors in suing leading chatbot makers, alleging they infringed the copyright of her "The Bedwetter" memoir. The daughter of the late Robin Williams called it "gross" and "maddening" when users of OpenAI's AI video generator Sora conjured up realistic "deepfakes" of the beloved actor to churn out what she described as "horrible TikTok slop puppeteering." "You're not making art, you're making disgusting, overprocessed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs-up and like it," Zelda Williams wrote in October. And the estate of legendary comic George Carlin last year settled a lawsuit against podcasters who purportedly cloned his voice to make a fake hourslong comedy special. Comics have also relished mocking AI tools. A recent "South Park" episode called "Sora Not Sorry" had a bumbling police detective investigate a scourge of fake videos. Lajoie, known for his work on the TV series "The League" and comic songs on YouTube, tried to see what would happen if he asked ChatGPT to help craft a bizarre movie script idea. He said it gave him something "super boring" about "grandma's dentures and a talking raccoon." "That level of human creativity, it can't mimic -- yet -- or at least maybe I'm not great at prompting," he said. Instead, he found it useful to cheaply animate ideas he would otherwise never have pursued -- such as the talking baby, birds wearing jeans, or a podcasting Jesus Christ interviewing an Easter Bunny who's never heard of him. The prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invited Lajoie and Willonius to exhibit their video creations this fall at a new AI gallery space in Manhattan, part of a promotion of AI creativity tool startups that the firm invests in. Willonius obliged. Lajoie ended up bowing out, after an interview with The Associated Press in which he voiced doubts about what he described as AI's "Napster phase." The music-sharing website shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations. The investment firm's co-founder, Marc Andreessen, has been bullish about AI's potential to bring new life into filmmaking and comedy. On a November podcast, he blamed Hollywood opposition to its adoption on "woke activists (who) have picked up AI as the new thing they're going to agitate about." He compared it to resistance to computer graphics in movies before they became commonplace. Lajoie said he shared his early AI video experiments with a few friends who are "anti-AI; real, real, anti-AI" and they were surprised by how well the sketches retained Lajoie's own comedic voice. He insists he's no AI expert, just "a creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other." But even editing the sketches requires understanding comedic timing, and he has no interest in ceding that part to a machine. "The thing with comedy is it's so related to performance, delivery and point of view," Lajoie said. "Do AIs have a point of view? They can grab a few points of view from different people." "And when it does have a point of view, I think that's when we all should be afraid for all of the reasons that the Terminator has taught us," he said.

Can AI ever be funny? Some comedians embrace AI tools but they're still running the show

A baby and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio. "Welcome to the talking baby podcast," says the infant, wearing headphones and sounding like a deep-voiced radio broadcaster. "On today's episode, we'll be talking to the weird-looking person who lives at my house." So begins a series of humourous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that's attracted millions of views on social media. They're a nod to the 1989 movie "Look Who's Talking" but produced in a matter of hours and without a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget. AI helped do all of that, but it didn't craft the punch lines. It's a relief to comedian Jon Lajoie, who made the videos, that AI chatbots just aren't "inherently funny." "It can't write comedy," said Lajoie. "It can't do any of that." For now, at least, they won't take his job. Lajoie's viral videos have gained him attention as an AI-adopting entertainer that's he's not entirely comfortable with as he grapples with what all this means for the future of his very human craft of making people laugh. King Willonius is not feeling so cautious. His first big hit was an AI-generated song called "BBL Drizzy" that made fun of rapper Drake during the height of his feud with Kendrick Lamar. He's since moved into making AI video parodies like "I'm McLovin It (Popeye's Diss Song)" and "I Want My Barrel Back (Cracker Barrel song)." "It's very similar to somebody who's writing for The Onion or SNL," Willonius said. "I try to find out, OK, what's my comedic angle on this particular topic? And then I'll generate a video from that." He starts with writing his own notes on an idea, then refines it with a chatbot, and puts that language -- known as a prompt -- into AI tools that can generate imagery, video, music and voices. The key, he says, is to keep iterating. But he wouldn't just ask it for a joke -- Willonius says most chatbot-generated comedy lacks the "nuances or complexities that it takes for jokes to really land." A scholar of comedy, Michelle Robinson, said "a lot of the stuff that I've seen AI produce is corny as hell." "It does seem fluent in the basic grammar of jokes, but sometimes they're slightly off," said Robinson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They may be moderately funny, but I think they're really missing an important element of what makes us laugh." What are they missing? She's not totally sure, except that most good jokes are a little edgy or dangerous and chatbots can't seem to calibrate "whatever provocation is in the joke to the moment that we're living in." Caleb Warren, a professor who studies marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona, said that leaves comedy writers with an opportunity to make use of tools that can't completely outsource their skills. "The ideas that are driving the humor are coming from the human comedian," but the AI tools can help them execute and illustrate them, Warren said. Willonius was a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with AI during Hollywood's actor and writer strikes in 2023. "I leaned all the way into AI because I didn't know what else to do with my free time," he said. "I was doing everything I could to try to break into Hollywood. And once the writers' strike happened, that kind of shut that down. I started to learn these AI tools and get really good at them and started to cultivate an audience." While Willonius saw an opening, the rise of generative AI has stoked division and posed challenges to other professional comedians. Sarah Silverman joined book authors in suing leading chatbot makers, alleging they infringed the copyright of her "The Bedwetter" memoir. The daughter of the late Robin Williams called it "gross" and "maddening" when users of OpenAI's AI video generator Sora conjured up realistic "deepfakes" of the beloved actor to churn out what she described as "horrible TikTok slop puppeteering." "You're not making art, you're making disgusting, overprocessed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs-up and like it," Zelda Williams wrote in October. And the estate of legendary comic George Carlin last year settled a lawsuit against podcasters who purportedly cloned his voice to make a fake hourslong comedy special. Comics have also relished mocking AI tools. A recent "South Park" episode called "Sora Not Sorry" had a bumbling police detective investigate a scourge of fake videos. Lajoie, known for his work on the TV series "The League" and comic songs on YouTube, tried to see what would happen if he asked ChatGPT to help craft a bizarre movie script idea. He said it gave him something "super boring" about "grandma's dentures and a talking raccoon." "That level of human creativity, it can't mimic -- yet -- or at least maybe I'm not great at prompting," he said. Instead, he found it useful to cheaply animate ideas he would otherwise never have pursued -- such as the talking baby, birds wearing jeans, or a podcasting Jesus Christ interviewing an Easter Bunny who's never heard of him. The prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invited Lajoie and Willonius to exhibit their video creations this fall at a new AI gallery space in Manhattan, part of a promotion of AI creativity tool startups that the firm invests in. Willonius obliged. Lajoie ended up bowing out, after an interview with The Associated Press in which he voiced doubts about what he described as AI's "Napster phase." The music-sharing website shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations. The investment firm's co-founder, Marc Andreessen, has been bullish about AI's potential to bring new life into filmmaking and comedy. On a November podcast, he blamed Hollywood opposition to its adoption on "woke activists (who) have picked up AI as the new thing they're going to agitate about." He compared it to resistance to computer graphics in movies before they became commonplace. Lajoie said he shared his early AI video experiments with a few friends who are "anti-AI; real, real, anti-AI" and they were surprised by how well the sketches retained Lajoie's own comedic voice. He insists he's no AI expert, just "a creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other." But even editing the sketches requires understanding comedic timing, and he has no interest in ceding that part to a machine. "The thing with comedy is it's so related to performance, delivery and point of view," Lajoie said. "Do AIs have a point of view? They can grab a few points of view from different people." "And when it does have a point of view, I think that's when we all should be afraid for all of the reasons that the Terminator has taught us," he said.