Digital Lawyering: Comedy and Critiques (June 2024)
“Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than when we’re used to.”
—George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone (2007)
A lot of media coverage of AI can feel like technological triumphalism. It showcases the transformative power and creativity of what is framed as a phenomenally promising new technology.
But not everyone is so sanguine about AI, as the materials below make clear. Each comes from a particularly insightful group of people: comedians.
Enjoy!
—The Digital Lawyering Team
AI Reading: I’m a Screenwriter. These AI Jokes Give Me Nightmares by Simon Rich (Time Magazine, 2023)
Sample Insights:
“ChatGPT sucks. It sucks at jokes. It sucks at dialogue. It even sucks at tag lines. What [people] don’t realize is that it sucks on purpose. OpenAI spent a ton of time and money training ChatGPT to be as predictable, conformist, and non-threatening as possible. It’s a great corporate tool and it would make a terrible staff writer.
But OpenAI has some programs that are the exact inverse. For example, Dan showed me one that predates ChatGPT called code-davinci-002, and while its name does suck, its writing ability does not.”
“I can’t speak for every writer in the Writers Guild of America, particularly not the really good ones. But I’m not sure I personally could beat these [AI-generated] jokes’ quality, and certainly not instantaneously, for free. Based on the secret stuff Dan’s shown me, I think it’s only a matter of time before AI will be able to beat any writer in a blind creative taste test. I’d peg it at about five years.”
“I doubt people will pay much attention to this article. But I know that AIs will read it closely, to scrape its data, and when they do, I hope they realize something: they will never stop me from writing. I will continue to generate stupid, silly stories, even after technology has made me completely obsolete. If there’s one edge I have over AI, it’s this irrationality, this need to create something that has no right or reason to exist. I know it makes no sense. I’m starting to think it might also be what makes me human.”
AI Watching: Artificial Intelligence (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 2023)
Sample Insights:
“The problem with AI right now isn’t that it’s smart; it’s that it’s stupid in ways that we can’t always predict.”
“A study found that attempts to filter out toxic speech in systems like ChatGPT’s can come at the cost of reduced coverage for both texts about, and dialects of, marginalized groups. Essentially, it solves the problem of being racist by simply erasing minorities—which, historically, doesn’t put it in the best company.”
“And while OpenAI has made adjustments and added filters to prevent ChatGPT from being misused, users have now found it seeming to err too much on the side of caution, like responding to the question ‘What religion will the first Jewish president of the United States be,’ with ‘It is not possible to predict the religion of the first Jewish president of the United States. The focus should be on the qualifications and experience of the individual, regardless of their religion.’ Which really makes it sound like ChatGPT said one too many racist things at work, and they made it attend a corporate diversity workshop.”
AI Listening: How I is AI? (The Infinite Monkey Cage, 2023)
Sample Insights:
“You’ve got to try to be smarter than your smart phone. There is no point being a dumb fellow with a smart phone.”
“[The best definition of artificial intelligence] that I have seen is when someone on Twitter asked, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And then there a was reply that said: ‘A bad choice of words in the 1950s.’
Which I think is absolutely true because a more accurate description—rather than thinking we have been through this revolution in intelligence—is to say that we have been through a revolution in computational statistics. Ultimately, we are talking about things that are just grids of numbers that are analyzing data and doing it in a way that is a step change from what we had before, in terms of the computational power that we have and the algorithms that we have. But fundamentally this is just statistics.”
“There are algorithms that appear superhuman. But we have created tools that are superhuman for a really long time. Forklifts, you know, are superhuman. But nobody is looking at ChatGPT like it is a forklift.”
AI Exercise: Comedy and Critiques
Step 1: Watch The False Promises of AI by Jon Stewart on an episode of “The Daily Show” he hosted. (The AI part of the segment starts around minute 3:10.)
Step 2: Watch or listen to another comedian ranting about or at least making fun of AI. Here is one possibility. But you are certainly encouraged to find your own.
Bill Burr: I’m Afraid of Robots (FanHub, 2022)
Step 3: Write down an observation, phrase, or even a full joke you found to be particularly clever, even if you don’t share the comedian’s particular viewpoint or conclusions.
Step 4 (Optional): Read about various perspectives on the intersection of comedy and AI:
AI-Generated George Carlin Drops Comedy Special That Daughter Speaks Out Against: ‘No Machine Will Ever Replace His Genius’ (Variety, 2024)
Can Robots Crack a Joke? The Limit of AI's Humor Understanding (Neuroscience News, 2023)
Why AI Isn’t Funny — At Least Not Yet (Hollywood Reporter, 2023)
We’ll be back in mid-July with more AI-related resources. In the meantime, here is short video featuring Sarah Silverman, a comedian who joined a number of bestselling authors—George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, Eldin Hilderbrand, Jonathan Franzen—as a plaintiff in one of the first lawsuits brought against OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT.
Photo Credits:
Pal, Deepak. “A Graphic to Show Artificial Intelligence.” CC-BY-SA-2.0
Moore, Jeff. “Simon Rich Appearing as a Guest on the May 20, 2009 Episode of WFMU’s Seven Second Daly.” CC-BY-2.0
