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A child and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio.
“Welcome to the Talking Baby Podcast,” says the baby, wearing headphones and sounding like a deep-voiced radio broadcaster. “In today’s episode, we’ll be talking to that strange looking guy who lives at my house.”
So begins a series of humorous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that have attracted millions of people on social media. They are set for the 1989 film “Look Who’s Talking,” but it was produced in just a few hours and without millions of dollars. Hollywood Budget.
AI helped do all this, but it didn’t create the punch lines. It’s a relief to comedian John Lajoie, who made the video, that AI chatbots are not “inherently funny.”
“Can’t write this comedy,” Lajoie said. “It can’t do anything like that.”
For now, at least, they won’t take his job.
LaJoie’s viral video has brought him attention as an AI-adopting entertainer, which he’s not entirely comfortable with as he grapples with what it all means for the future of his human art of making people laugh.
King Villanous is not feeling so cautious. His first big hit was an AI-generated song called “BBL Drizzy”, which mocked the rapper Fly During the height of his feud with Kendrick Lamar. He has since gone on to create AI video parodies such as “I’m McLovin’ It (Popeye’s Dis Song)” and “I Want My Barrel Back (Cracker Barrel Song)”.
“It’s like someone who’s writing for The Onion or SNL,” Wilonius said. “I try to figure out, OK, what’s my comedic take on this particular topic? And then I’ll create a video from that.”
He starts by writing his own notes on an idea, then refines it with a chatbot, and feeds that language — known as prompts — into an AI tool that can generate imagery, video, music, and sounds. He says the key is to keep repeating.
But he wouldn’t ask for it just for the sake of a joke — Wilonius says most chatbot-generated comedy lacks “the nuance or complexity it takes to really get the joke off the ground.”
Comedy Scholar, Michelle robinsonSaid, “A lot of the things I’ve seen produced by AI are extremely poor.”
“It seems like it’s fluent in the basic grammar of jokes, but sometimes they’re 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 missing an important element of what really makes us laugh.”
What is missing in them? He’s not entirely sure, except that most good jokes are a little bit sarcastic or dangerous and that chatbots “seem unable to calibrate whatever provocation there is to the moment we’re living in.”
Caleb Warren, a professor who studies marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona, said comedy writers get the opportunity to use tools that they can’t fully outsource their skills to.
“The ideas that are inspiring the humor are coming from the human comedian,” Warren said, “but AI tools can help execute and portray them.”
Wilonius was a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with AI during the Hollywood actor and writer strike in 2023.
“I gravitated toward AI solely because I didn’t know what else to do with my free time,” he said. “I was trying everything I could to get into Hollywood. And once the writers’ strike happened, that kind of stopped working. I started learning these AI tools and got really good at them and started building audiences.”
While Villanous saw a head start, the rise of generative AI has fueled division and created challenges for other professional comedians.
sarah silverman Joined book authors in suing major chatbot makers, alleging they infringed the copyright of their “The Bedwetter” memoir. The daughter of the late Robin Williams called it “terrifying” and “maddening” after users of OpenAI’s AI video generator Sora created realistic “deepfakes” of the beloved actor, which she described as a “terrible TikTok slut puppet.”
“You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, highly processed hot dogs out of human lives, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat, hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it,” Zelda Williams wrote in October.
And the estate of famed comedian George Carlin settled a lawsuit last year against podcasters who allegedly cloned his voice to create a fake after-hours comedy special.
Comics have also liked to mock AI tools. In the recent “South Park” episode “Sorra Not Sorry”, a police detective investigated a fake video.
LaJoie, known for his work on the TV series “The League” and comic songs on YouTube, tried to see what would happen if he asked ChatGPT to help him craft a bizarre movie script idea. He said it gave him some “extremely boring” information about “granny teeth and talking raccoons.”
“That level of human creativity, I can’t yet imitate — or at least I’m probably not great at inspiring,” he said. Instead, they found it useful to cheaply animate ideas they otherwise would never have pursued – such as a talking baby, birds wearing jeans, or podcasting Jesus Christ interviewing an Easter Bunny who had never heard of him.
Major venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invited Lajoie and Wilonius to exhibit their video creations at a new AI Gallery space in Manhattan this fall, part of a promotion for an AI creativity tool startup in which the firm invests.
Wilonius obliged. LaJoie ended up bowing out after an interview with the Associated Press, in which he expressed skepticism about what he described as the “Napster phase” of AI. The music-sharing website took off in the early 2000s after the record industry and rock bands METALLICA A lawsuit was filed over copyright infringement.
The investment firm’s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, is excited about AI’s potential to bring new life to filmmaking and comedy. In a November podcast, he attributed Hollywood’s opposition to its adoption to “woke activists[who]have chosen AI as the new thing they’re going to agitate about.” He compared it to the resistance to computer graphics before they became common in films.
LaJoie said he shared his early AI video experiments with some friends who are “anti-AI; real, real, anti-AI” and they were surprised by how well the sketches retained LaJoie’s own comedic voice.
He emphasizes that he is no AI expert, just “a creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other.” But editing sketches also requires an understanding of comic timing, and he has no interest in handing that part over to a machine.
“The thing with comedy is that it’s all about performance, presentation and attitude,” LaJoie said. “Do AI have any viewpoint? They can get some viewpoints from different people.”
“And when it has some perspective, I think that’s when we should all be afraid for all the reasons the Terminator taught us,” he said.