My baby and my dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio.
“Welcome to the Talking Babies Podcast,” said the toddler, wearing headphones, in a deep voice that sounded like a radio broadcaster. “In today’s episode, I talk to a strange-looking person who lives in my house.”
Thus begins a series of humorous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that have garnered millions of views on social media. They’re inspired by the 1989 film Look Who’s Talking, but made in a matter of hours without Hollywood’s multi-million dollar budget.
AI helped with all of that, but it couldn’t create the punchline. Comedian John Rajoy, who created the video, expressed relief that AI chatbots are not “inherently funny.”
“You can’t write comedy like that,” Lajoie says. “It can’t do anything.”
They won’t take his job away, at least for now.
LaJoie’s viral video has garnered him attention as an AI-powered entertainer, but he’s far from happy about what all this means for the future of his very human art of making people laugh.
King Willonius doesn’t feel that wary. His first big hit was “BBL Drizzy,” an AI-generated song that poked fun at rapper Drake, who was at the height of his feud with Kendrick Lamar. Since then, he has begun producing AI video parodies such as “I’m McLovin It (Popeye’s Diss Song)” and “I Want My Barrel Back (Cracker Barrel Song).”
“It’s very similar to people writing for The Onion or SNL,” Willonius said. “I try to figure out what my comedic angle is on this particular topic, and then I generate a video from there.”
He starts by writing his own notes about ideas, refines them with chatbots, and incorporates that language, known as prompts, into AI tools that can generate images, video, music, and audio. The key, he says, is to keep repeating.
But he wasn’t just looking for jokes. Willonius said most of the comedy generated by chatbots lacks “the nuance and complexity necessary for the joke to really land.”
“A lot of what I’ve seen AI produce is completely banal,” said comedy scholar Michelle Robinson.
“The basic grammar of the joke seems to be fluent, but sometimes it’s a little off,” said Robinson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They may be moderately funny, but I think they’re really missing the key element that makes us laugh.”
What are they missing? She’s not entirely sure, but most good jokes are a little edgy or risky, and chatbots don’t seem to be able to adjust “to the moment we’re living in, no matter what provocation is in the joke.”
Caleb Warren, a professor of marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona, said comedy writers still have the opportunity to take advantage of tools that can’t be completely outsourced.
“The ideas that drive humor come from human comedians,” Warren says, but AI tools can help execute and explain it.
Willonius is a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with AI during the 2023 Hollywood actors and writers strike.
“I’ve always been into AI because I didn’t know what else to do with my free time,” he said. “I was doing everything I could to get into Hollywood, and then once the writers’ strike happened, it kind of shut down. I started learning these AI tools and got really good at it and started developing an audience.”
While Willonious saw an opportunity, the rise of generative AI has been divisive and created challenges for other professional comedians.
Sarah Silverman joins other book authors in suing a major chatbot maker for violating the copyright of her memoir, “The Bedwetter.” The daughter of the late Robin Williams has called it “disgusting” and “upsetting” after users of OpenAI’s AI video generator Sora created realistic “deepfakes” of the popular actor, creating a slew of what she described as “terrible TikTok puppet shows.”
Zelda Williams wrote in October, “You’re not making art, you’re making a disgusting, over-processed hot dog out of the history of human life and art and music, shoving it down someone else’s throat, and hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it.”
And last year, the estate of legendary comic George Carlin settled a lawsuit against a podcaster who allegedly cloned his voice to create a fake, hour-long comedy special.
Comics also have fun mocking AI tools. A recent “South Park” episode, “Sora Not Sorry,” featured a bumbling detective investigating a fake video scandal.
Lajoie, known for his TV series “The League” and comic songs on YouTube, wanted to see what would happen if he asked ChatGPT to create ideas for bizarre movie scripts. He said he felt “very bored” about “Grandma’s false teeth and a talking raccoon.”
“That level of human creativity can’t be replicated yet, or at least I’m probably not very good at stimulating it,” he says. Instead, I found it useful for cheaply animating ideas I never would have pursued otherwise, like talking babies, birds in jeans, or a Jesus Christ podcast interviewing the Easter Bunny I’ve never heard of.
Prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invited Mr. Lajoie and Mr. Willonius to exhibit their video work at its new AI Gallery space in Manhattan this fall, as part of a push to boost startups of AI creativity tools in which the firm is investing.
Willonius fulfilled his duty. Lajoie eventually resigned after expressing doubts about what he described as the “Napster phase” of AI in an interview with The Associated Press. The music-sharing website was shut down in the early 2000s after the recording industry and rock band Metallica filed suit for copyright infringement.
Investment firm co-founder Marc Andreessen is bullish on AI’s potential to breathe new life into filmmaking and comedy. In a podcast in November, he blamed Hollywood’s opposition to its introduction on “woke activists picking up on AI as the new thing to agitate.” He likened it to the resistance to computer graphics in movies before they became commonplace.
Lajoie said that when he shared his early AI video experiments with several friends, “Anti-AI, Reality, Reality, Anti-AI,” they were surprised at how well the sketches retained Lajoie’s own comedic voice.
He claims he’s not an AI expert, just “a creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other.” But editing a sketch also requires an understanding of comedic timing, and he’s not interested in handing that part over to a machine.
“The thing about comedy is that it’s so much about performance, expression and perspective,” Lajoie said. “Does AI have points of view? AI can take several points of view from different people.”
“And I think when The Terminator has a point of view, it’s a time for all of us to be afraid, for all the reasons The Terminator taught us,” he said.
