Not Human, Funnier
Summary
"By being AI itself, it became more human."
Chatbots are increasingly applied to domains previously reserved for human actors. One such domain is comedy, whereby both the general public working with ChatGPT and research-based LLMsystems have tried their hands on making humor. In formative interviews with professional comedians and video analyses of standup comedy in humans, we found that human performers often use their ethnic, gender, community, and demographic-based identity to enable joke-making. This suggests whether the identity of AI itself can empower AI humor generation for human audiences. We designed a machine-identity-based agent that uses its own status as AI to tell jokes in online performance format. Studies with human audiences (N=32) showed that machine-identity-based agents were seen as funnier than baseline-GPT agent. This work suggests the design of human-AI integrated systems that explicitly utilize AI as its own unique identity apart from humans.
Publication: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'26), arxiv.