Study finds artificial intelligence is funnier than humans

A study has claimed artificial intelligence is funnier than humans after people rated jokes written by both.

Artificial intelligence is possibly one of the fastest and most frightening areas of technological development that exists, with the very real potential that it could threaten the future of human society.

Studies suggest it is already changing the shape of the workforce, with Gen Z workers who have recently been hired at risk of being fired by employers and replaced by AI.

As AI continues to develop, those in the arts are increasingly coming under threat as the technology learns to replicate and even improve on creative content.

That’s what happened when researchers at the University of Southern California put human beings up against AI in comedy challenges.

As part of the study, 105 humans were asked to provide their funniest responses to prompts. One question asked what the acronyms “S.T.D”, “C.L.A.P” and “C.O.W” could stand for.

Another challenge was a “fill in the blank” type task, while the final challenge asked them to “roast” someone.

One prompt said: “Imagine that one of your friends wants your opinion on how well she sings.

“She sings a minute or two to demonstrate her voice, and you cringe — she might be the worst singer you ever heard.

“When she asks, ‘So how was it?’ you decide to be honest so you say, ‘To be honest, listening to that was like: _____.’”

The same prompts were then given to ChatGPT, which generated 20 different responses to each task.

200 human judges were tasked with rating the responses from 0, meaning not funny at all, to 6, very funny.

The results were extremely telling, as 69.5 per cent of the time the judges deemed ChatGPT’s responses funnier than those crafted by humans.

In the roast task, AI beat humans by a whopping 87 per cent, while the tech came out on top by 73 per cent in the acronym challenge.

Lead researcher Drew Gorenz explained: “Since ChatGPT can’t feel emotions itself but it tells novel jokes better than the average human, these studies provide evidence that you don’t need to feel the emotions of appreciating a good joke to tell a really good one yourself.”

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