Telling a well-crafted joke that hits just right might seem like it requires a uniquely human touch. But there's bad news for comedians - as researchers from the University of Southern California say that AI is now funnier than most humans. In their study, ChatGPT was able to craft punchlines that were rated funnier than human efforts 70 per cent of the time. And this isn't a laughing matter, as the researchers warn that joke-writing robots could pose a'serious employment threat' to professional comedians. So, can you tell which of these jokes were written by a robot?

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 used a combination of surveys and focus groups aimed at measuring how useful AI is at different tasks. 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. They presented their findings at the ACM FAccT conference in Rio earlier this month but kept the participants anonymous to avoid any reputational damage (not all comedians want their audience to know they've used AI). The researchers asked 20 professional comedians who already used AI in their artistic process to use a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Google Gemini (then Bard) to generate material that they'd feel comfortable presenting in a comedic context.