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Writing Tip: ChatGPT doesn’t have a sense of humor. If you can inject your own sense of levity, weirdness, quirkiness, or humor into your writing, you’re doing something that AI can’t. 

What makes someone funny? Is it something that a Large Language Learning model can emulate? If an LLM could mimic the complex set of psychological, social, and biological factors that turn someone into the class clown, would it succeed in making you laugh? 

If you prompt ChatGPT to be funny, it might be able to cobble together enough threads of information from your favorite comedians to land on some good jokes. But it would be more like a coincidence than ChatGPT actually hitting the bullseye. 

AI can mimic individuals and tones of voice in a very realistic way, but its outputs are limited by the fact that these models don’t actually know anything. They generate responses based on data they’ve been trained on, which results in content that is reality-adjacent, but not actual reality. That’s why ChatGPT fails to get the basics of humor just right. Because it isn’t concocting that special recipe of ingredients that makes someone funny; it is drawing on its dataset to generate what is most likely funny. 

While impressive, AI buts up against the hard limits of a technology that doesn’t actually know anything. And that’s a pretty high wall to climb; it will be interesting to see if AI models ever do ascend over it.

Context, timing, and nuance are all parts of humor that AI can’t generate on its own. Even when a model is fed exactly what humor should be, it doesn’t actually understand what that information means or how to use it, because your instructions are based on human experience, and AI doesn’t have that. When you’re writing, give credit to your audience. Both they, and you, have an intellect. That means you’re all capable of generating more than bland, generic content. You’re capable of being funny, or charming, or relatable. And there’s no AI model that will be headlining a standup show at Madison Square Garden anytime soon. ChatGPT isn’t funny.