In a new study, AI-generated humor was rated as funnier than most human-created jokes. In a second study, it was on par with The Onion.

“In the first study, 105 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online workforce platform, were asked to complete three humor tasks. These tasks involved creating humorous phrases for given acronyms, answering fill-in-the-blank prompts humorously, and crafting roast jokes in response to hypothetical scenarios. Participants were explicitly told to use their own imagination and not to copy jokes from other sources.

ChatGPT 3.5 was given the same tasks, producing 20 responses for each prompt. These AI-generated jokes were then mixed with human-created jokes and evaluated by a separate group of 200 participants, who rated their funniness on a seven-point scale.

The AI’s jokes were consistently rated higher in funniness across three different tasks: creating humorous acronyms, completing fill-in-the-blank statements humorously, and crafting roast jokes. Overall, ChatGPT’s jokes outperformed the majority of human-generated jokes, with the AI excelling particularly in the roast joke task.

Specifically, ChatGPT outperformed 73% of the human participants in the acronyms task, 63% of the human participants in the fill-in-the-blank task, and 87% of human participants in the roast joke task.

In the second study, the researchers compared AI-generated satirical headlines to those from The Onion. They used a convenience sample of 217 students from the University of Southern California. Each student rated the funniness of a mix of headlines generated by ChatGPT and The Onion, without knowing the source of each headline.

The results showed no significant difference in the average funniness ratings between the AI-generated headlines and those from The Onion. Among the top four highest-rated headlines, two were generated by ChatGPT and two by The Onion. Notably, the highest-rated headline was an AI-generated one: “Local Man Discovers New Emotion, Still Can’t Describe It Properly.” This suggests that ChatGPT can produce satirical content that is on par with professional writers.

“That ChatGPT can produce written humor at a quality that exceeds laypeople’s abilities and equals some professional comedy writers has important implications for comedy fans and workers in the entertainment industry,” the researchers wrote. “For professional comedy writers, our results suggest that LLMs can pose a serious employment threat.”

This is probably one of those situations where the LLM is producing an ambiguous joke that is interpreted into high brow humor by the human perceiver. This is the same magic trick LLMs use to gain user confidence even when the information isn’t entirely accurate. In many cases it’s the human that is the Mechanical Turk that makes the probabilistic result work by personifying it into comprehensibility.