Well, there are clearly some of them that I wish this technology could replace.

All joking aside (pardon the pun), the title question came to mind when reading this Wall Street Journal piece from Ben Eisen. To be clear, Eisen isn’t a professional comedian. He’s a banking and finance reporter for the WSJ. But he recently decided to enter a pun competition at a New York comedy club. As an experiment, rather than relying on his own wit, he arranged to compete using puns created by the new AI chatbot ChatGPT. I found the experiment fascinating since I regularly cover AI issues and have engaged with several chatbots myself, finding wildly varying levels of quality between them. ChatGPT is reportedly one of the best of the latest crop of chatbots, but could it handle comedy? As Eisen found out during his time on stage, puns are complicated and the chatbot didn’t do all that well.

I asked the chatbot for help. “Tell me a pun,” I typed in. “Why was the math book sad? Because it had too many problems,” it answered. More of a dad joke than a pun, I thought. It was the first of many times the bot would spit out that answer.

My colleagues and I typed in different prompts, but struggled to get anything particularly witty. “Word play about Kalamazoo” returned snores such as “Kalamazoo: where history comes alive.” …

Watching videos of pun-offs, it was clear that one key to designing a pun that would land was to start with the punny word and work your way back toward the setup.

Would the robot know that? I had a little hope.

The puns that the chatbot came up with for Eisen were, to be charitable, not particularly witty. He initially asked it to generically create a pun for him. The bot said, “Why was the math book sad? Because it had too many problems.” I agree with the author, who described that as being “more of a dad joke” than an actual pun. And it’s one that would likely produce more groans than laughs.

Another example was, “In Peoria, the corn is so sweet it’s almost sinful.” Again, the bot doesn’t really seem to be grasping the fundamental concept of a pun. In what Eisen described as the bot’s very best effort, it wrote, “What’s the state where common sense is in short supply? Flori-duh.” Okay. Not terrible, but not particularly gut-busting either.

I created an account at ChatGPT and decided to experiment a bit myself. Rather than puns, I simply asked it to tell me a joke. It came up with, “Why couldn’t the bicycle stand up by itself? Because it was two-tired!” Again… we seem to be in dad joke territory, but I think my own previous research offers a reason as to why. (Incidentally, I also asked the bot if it knew of a theory claiming that there are more than three physical dimensions. The bot delivered five paragraphs discussing the three basic dimensions, string theory with nine dimensions plus time, and the Kaluza-Klein theory with four dimensions. It truly shined when given that sort of task.)

As to humor and particularly puns, I believe the mediocre results are not the fault of the programmers who built the bot, but the fact that there is no true intelligence or, if you prefer, “consciousness” behind it. What it has is a mind-bogglingly huge library of existing documents and conversations between humans and the ability to produce structurally correct and “conversational” sentences, paragraphs, etc. It finds similarities where all of those words and phrases show up and identifies other words and phrases that follow them. So when you ask it a question, what you’re really getting is a revised assembly of answers that other people have given in the real world.

How does that relate to humor? When you ask it to tell you a joke, it goes and finds jokes that other people have told in response to the word “joke.” But a pun is different. A pun requires thought and the ability to take an expected thought and add a twist to it so that it creates a warped but humorous phrase.

That sounds like a task that is a bit beyond the abilities of a massive text library, no matter how fast it can analyze and assemble text. Also, many people talk about “jokes” but people who engage in punning don’t nearly as often start by saying “tell me a pun.” ChatGPT probably has a lot less material to work with. Or at least that’s my theory, anyway. Your mileage may vary.

As a closing note, I told the chatbot that I’m a reporter working on an article about it and asked if it would like to give me a quote to use in this piece. Here’s the response it gave me:

“I’m sorry, but I’m not able to offer a quote for your article. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and I don’t have the ability to provide personal opinions or statements. My function is to provide information and answer questions to the best of my ability based on the data and knowledge I have been trained on. I hope this helps, and I wish you the best of luck with your article. Let me know if you have any other questions.”