The thing about living on Earth long enough is that we all end up in the future. Those in late middle age often joke about how “we were promised flying cars,” thinking back on the gleaming futuristic life promised to them as children by The Jetsons.
We did not get the flying cars, and not many aside from some Japanese have a Rosie the Robot to wash their floors and fix dinner. Probably the biggest driver of future shock right now is the roll-out of artificial intelligence (AI). The technology is already frighteningly good and capable of producing photorealistic, motion picture fakes of real people that are indistinguishable from reality. Just ask actor Tom Hanks, who was alarmed to recently find that “his voice” and image were shilling for a dental insurance plan. But it wasn’t him, it was an AI avatar of the actor.
And now, he’s starring in a film in which he appears to be no more than 25 years old, thanks to AI.
But can AI be funny? At least some stand-up comics think so. Canadian comic Anesti Danelis played around with one of the popular AI “chatbots,” ChatGPT, and asked the computer program to script out an entire show. It did, and now Danelis is acting the show out on stage this summer at the famous Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.
It’s called “Artificially Intelligent.” Danelis said he was really just “playing around” at first, and found he was laughing at how terrible but funny some of the robotic jokes were. Maybe there was potential for a whole show based around the concept?
Danelis threw just about everything at the chatbot to see what it would throw back. He prompted it to write about “bisexual dilemmas,” to write songs, to construct a funny scenario about being a child immigrant. Some of what he got back bombed, and some of it was genuinely amusing.
But what shocked the comic was how well the system seemed to understand the mechanics and organization that go into writing a workable script. When he asked it to make a rundown and to explain its decisions about where to place certain lines, or where a song should go, what he got back “made total sense.”
Disturbing for anyone who sees themselves as creative, but Danelis said that while the program could write a fairly good show, it took a human like him to deliver it with the right timing. “Human creativity can’t be replicated or replaced,” he said, even though a full 20 percent of his show was written by the robot.
An AI version of the late great comic George Carlin made a big splash early in 2024, but most people didn’t find it convincing.
That may be true for now, but writers, artists, and others are watching the technology with a jaundiced eye. Everyone would love to replace their own hands with a robot’s when it comes to washing the dishes, but few of us enjoy the thought of our minds being made redundant.
