A child and his family’s dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio.
“Welcome to Talking Baby Podcast“In today’s episode, we’re going to talk to the strange-looking person who lives in my house,” says the baby, wearing headphones and sounding like a deep-voiced radio announcer.
Thus begins a series of humorous interactions between two AI-animated characters that have attracted millions of views on social media. It’s a reference to the 1989 film “Look Who’s Talking,” but it was made in a matter of hours and without the multi-million dollar Hollywood budget.
AI helped do all that, but it didn’t craft the perfect lines. It’s comforting for a comedian John Lajoiewho made the videos, said that AI chatbots are not “inherently funny.”
“He can’t write comedy,” LaJoie said. “She can’t do any of that.”
For now, at least, they wouldn’t take his job.
Lajoie’s viral videos have caught his attention as an artist embracing artificial intelligence, something he’s not entirely comfortable with as he grapples with what this all means for the future of his humanitarian vocation of making people laugh.
King Wilonius He doesn’t feel very careful. His first big hit was an AI-generated song called “BBL Drizzy” which parodied rapper Drake during the height of his feud with Kendrick Lamar. He has since moved on to creating 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 someone writing for The Onion or SNL,” Wilonius said. “I’m trying to figure out, okay, what’s my comedic angle on this particular topic? And then I’ll make a video out of that.”
He starts by writing his own notes on an idea, then refines them with a chatbot, and puts that language — known as a vector — into AI tools that can generate images, video, music and sounds. The key, he says, is to keep iterating.
But he wouldn’t just ask it as a joke — most comedy produced by chatbots lacks “the nuance or complexity that jokes require to really deliver,” Wilonius says.
“A lot of the stuff I’ve seen AI produce is very corny,” said comedy scholar Michelle Robinson.
“He seems to have a good grasp of the basic grammar of jokes, but sometimes he’s a little off,” said Robinson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It might be kind of funny, but I think it’s really missing an important element of what makes us laugh.”
What are they missing? She’s not entirely sure, except that most good jokes are a bit sexy or serious, and chatbots don’t seem able to calibrate “any provocation in the joke to the moment we’re in.”
That leaves comedy writers with an opportunity to take advantage of tools that can’t fully outsource their skills, said Caleb Warren, a professor who studies marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona.
“The ideas that drive humor come from the human comedian,” Warren said, but AI tools can help them execute and illustrate them.
Wilonius was a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with artificial intelligence during the 2023 Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strike.
“I was drawn to artificial intelligence because I didn’t know what to do with my free time,” he said. “I was doing everything I could to try to break into Hollywood. Once the writers’ strike happened, that kind of shut down that. I started learning and mastering these AI tools and I started building an audience.”
While Wilonius saw an opportunity, the rise of generative AI was divisive and presented challenges for other professional comedians.
Sarah Silverman Join book authors in Sue leading chatbot makersClaiming that they infringed the copyright on her memoir “The Bedwetter.” The daughter of the late Robin Williams described it as “awful” and “maddening” when users of OpenAI’s AI-based video generator, Sora, conjured up realistic “fake images” of the beloved actor to produce what she described as a “horrific TikTok puppeteer”.
“You don’t make art, you make disgusting, overly processed sausages of human life, of the history of art and music, and then shove it down someone else’s throat in the hope that they will like it a little and like it,” Zelda Williams wrote in October.
And the ownership of legendary comedian George Carlin last year Resolve a lawsuit Against podcasters who allegedly cloned his voice to create a file An hour-long mock comedy special.
The comics have also enjoyed making fun of AI tools. In a recent episode of South Park titled “Sora Not Sorry,” a bumbling police detective was investigating the scourge of fake videos.
Lajoie, known for his work on the TV series “The League” and YouTube videos, tried to figure out what would happen if he asked ChatGPT to help formulate a weird movie script idea. He said she gave him something “very boring” about “granny’s dentures and a talking raccoon.”
“This level of human creativity cannot be imitated – yet – or at least I may not be as good at stimulating it,” he said. Instead, he found it useful to animate ideas that he would never have pursued—such as an animated film The child speaksOr birds in jeans, or a podcast about Jesus Christ interviewing an Easter Bunny he’d never heard of.
Prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invited Lajoie and Willonius to showcase their video creations this fall at its new Artificial Intelligence Expo space in Manhattan, as part of a promotion of AI creativity tool startups in which the firm is investing.
Wilonius obliged. Lajoie ended up exiting after an interview with the Associated Press in which he expressed doubts about what he described as the “Napster phase” of artificial intelligence. The music sharing site was shut down in the early 2000s after the record label and rock band Metallica sued for copyright violations.
The investment firm’s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, was optimistic about AI’s ability to breathe new life into film and comedy making. In a podcast in November, he blamed Hollywood’s opposition to relying on “woke activists (who) have picked up on AI as the new thing to get angry about.” He compared it to the resistance to computer graphics in movies before they became popular.
Lajoie said he shared his early AI video experiences with a few “anti-AI; real, real, anti-AI” friends and they were surprised by how well the graphics retained Lajoie’s comedic voice.
He insists that he is not an expert in artificial intelligence, but merely “a creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other.” But even editing graphics requires an understanding of comedic timing, and he has no interest in ceding that part to a machine.
“The thing about comedy is that it’s so tied to performance and delivery and point of view,” Lajoie said. “Does AI have a point of view? They can get some points of view from different people.”
“And when it has a point, I think that’s when we should all be afraid for all the reasons that the Terminator movie taught us,” he said.