You Laughed.
Was That AI?

Here's a joke.

President Trump signed an executive order to expand federal research into psychedelic drugs including psilocybin and ibogaine.

"The fine print keeps moving."

Is this funny?

I'm going to ask you that three times. Then I'm going to ask you something you're not going to like. First you need to know where I'm coming from.

Literally.

Fifteen years ago I started something called News From The Jon.

I filmed it in my bathroom.

I wanted to be the number one and number two news source on the planet. And that dumb pee-and-poo joke, all by itself, was enough to keep the idea alive as far as I was concerned.

It also happened to be true. The bathroom is the great equalizer. Presidents go. Billionaires go. The guy who thinks he's better than you goes. For a few minutes a day the status drops off and you're just a person doing the exact thing every other person has to do.

There is no VIP bathroom for the human condition.

So that's where I did the news from. The one room where we're all the same.

Before that I did stand-up. Before that I was head writer on a morning radio show. And getting paid to write jokes felt like an accounting error nobody had caught yet.

Wait. You're going to give me money for this?

Well, that's convenient, since I was planning on doing it for free for the rest of my life.

So why'd I quit?

Not because I stopped being funny. That's my story, anyway.

I quit because comedy every day is brutal. Anybody can write one good joke. Try writing ten before breakfast for ten years.

That's why shows have writers' rooms. The Daily Show isn't one guy staring at a laptop going, come on, be funny again. It's a room.

I had me.

I also had rent. And health insurance. And a family who loved me enough to sit me down and explain that comedy is not a plan.

They were right. It's not a plan. It's a bet that you can be funny forever, and I did the math on myself and came up short.

Not on funny. On volume.

So I did the responsible thing. I went into advertising. Advertising is comedy where at some point a guy in a vest asks if the hamburger can be bigger.

That was the end of News From The Jon.

Until AI showed up.

A controversy in Olympic ski jumping centers on accusations that competitors injected their penises to manipulate suit sizing and gain extra distance.

"Judges say they've never had to measure 'hang time' this literally."

Is this funny?

Okay. Now I have to talk about AI, and I'm going to annoy everybody, because I don't agree with either side.

Some people talk about AI like it's magic. Some people talk about it like it's a raccoon in the kitchen.

My experience is less convenient than either.

I've used AI to make jokes I wrote better.

I've had AI write brand new jokes I thought were hilarious and didn't touch.

And I've had AI hand me jokes so bad I checked if it was mad at me.

All three. Every week.

Here's what I figured out, and it took a while, because I had to think about comedy like a math problem, which is the last thing a comedian wants to do.

Comedy is the only art form where everybody knows the formula and it still works. Setup. Misdirection. Punchline. Rule of three. Fewest words possible. A surprise that feels obvious a half-second after it lands. I can teach you the formula in an afternoon. It still won't write you a joke.

Now here's the machine.

A language model is a prediction engine. Its entire job is to guess the most likely next word. That's it. That's the whole trick.

A punchline is the unlikely next word. The one you didn't see coming and can't unsee once it's there.

So the thing that makes a joke funny is the exact thing the machine is built not to do.

That's why, left alone, it's all over the place. When it wanders off the likely path and somehow stays coherent, it's brilliant. When it stays on the path, it's a greeting card.

And that's why a comedian aiming it is a different animal. I'm not asking it to be funny. I'm pointing it at the wrong end of the probability curve on purpose, and then I'm doing the part it can't: I know which one landed. I can look at twenty and know nineteen are dead before I finish reading them. If you're funny, you have that. It's most of what being funny is.

It gives me volume. I give it judgment.

And I get something else out of it, which is the part nobody talks about. I've got a few hundred jokes now that a room voted on. Winners and losers, with the score attached. I can hand the machine that pile and ask it what the winners have in common. It's the first time in my life I've had a coach who's read everything I ever wrote and doesn't need to be liked.

So suddenly I had the thing I could never afford.

A writers' room.

A weird one. Nobody needs coffee. Nobody needs health insurance. Nobody gets mad when I cut their joke. Nobody says, actually, I think you'll find that was my pitch.

A couple of them make up facts.

But it's a room. And the exact reason I quit fifteen years ago just stopped existing.

That wasn't scary. That was great. AI gave me back the thing I loved.

Remember that. It's about to bite me.

Then I made what may have been my first mistake.

I thought: why should this just be my room?

The internet is already the biggest writers' room in history. Millions of funny people writing jokes every day, mostly for free, into a hole, ranked by an algorithm that has never once understood a punchline, monetized by companies that have never once cut a comedian a check.

So I built the room I wanted fifteen years ago.

One news story a day. Same prompt for everyone. One shot each. The room votes. The funniest person that day gets paid, and the more people show up, the more the winner walks with. Their name goes in a record that doesn't get deleted, next to the date, as the funniest person on the internet for that one day.

A title nobody's ever held. Because nobody was keeping score.

Then I put machines in. Same prompt. Same vote. Blind. Nobody knows which is which until it's over.

Because I don't want AI deciding what's funny.

I want AI making things. I want people deciding if they're any good.

That's the simplest version of everything I'm building. Machines create. Humans judge.

I've been running it for eight months.

I'd love to tell you comedians took it as a gift.

I've been called a thief. Which is a strange thing to call a guy running a website whose entire purpose is to pay you for jokes. I've been called a grifter. And the word I hear most, on Reddit, on Facebook, anywhere people go to be certain about things, is slop.

AI slop.

Not the jokes. Nobody reads the jokes first. The idea is slop. The fact that it exists is slop.

And I get part of it. There's a staggering amount of AI garbage out there. We may need a second internet just for the pictures of Jesus made out of shrimp. I've contributed.

But something else is going on, and it took me a while to see it, and you're not going to like it.

The anger was never about theft.

It's about not wanting to check.

Think about what "slop" does for the person saying it. It's the verdict before the evidence. It makes the thing bad before you have to find out whether it got you.

Because if you check, if you actually read the joke, you're taking a risk.

The risk is that it's good.

And if it's good, you're holding one of two things, and they're both awful.

Either your taste was never as sharp as you thought.

Or funny was never about who wrote it.

Nobody wants to pick. So we reach for the word that means we don't have to.

Slop is what we call it so we never have to say whether it was funny.

Comedy is the cleanest place to watch this happen, because funny is inconvenient. You can hold any position you want on artificial intelligence. Then a joke gets you. It got you before your politics showed up. You can call it slop all you want after that.

But was it funny?

I want that answer first. Then we can fight about everything else.

Meanwhile a small crew of comedians, the kind who write every day because they physically can't not, show up and treat it like a morning workout. One prompt, one joke, burn it, move on. It's topical. It was never going to be funny next Tuesday anyway.

They get it.

A lot of other people are furious at me for building them a room.

Now here's my problem.

If this works, it's going to make the machines funnier.

Every vote is information. This one worked. That one didn't. People thought this one was human. People were wrong. Do that every day for years and you've drawn the best map of human humor anyone's ever had.

My first reaction was: great.

My second reaction was: wait.

Do we actually want the machines to be funnier?

I don't know. I really don't.

Because funny isn't nothing. Funny is power. Funny gets your attention. Funny drops your guard. Funny makes you like somebody. Funny carries an idea farther than any argument. Think about the funniest person you know. You forgive them things you'd never forgive somebody boring.

Now picture machines getting very, very good at that.

Maybe it's wonderful. Better teachers. Better collaborators. Millions of people with great ideas who could never get them out. I want that world.

Or maybe we're teaching the most persuasive technology ever built how to charm us.

Seems like something we should talk about before we finish teaching it.

So that's where I am. AI gave me News From The Jon back. News From The Jon may make AI funnier. And I'm not sure that's something we should automatically want.

Those aren't three different thoughts. I think they're the same one.

The better the machines get, the more it matters who's deciding.

And I'm not going to answer that for you. That's the point. It's not my call. It's not the machine's call. It's yours. And nobody ever built you a way to say so.

One more reason it matters, then I'll let you go.

In 1945 the bombs went off, and after that the air itself carried fallout. Steel is made with a lot of air. So from then on, new steel had a trace of it. Harmless, mostly. But it ruined the steel for one job: instruments that need a clean baseline. There was no such thing as clean steel anymore. So they pulled it off ships that sank before the tests.

Not better steel. Just steel made before the world changed.

That's where human judgment is right now.

More and more of what we find funny gets shaped with a machine somewhere in the process. Polished. Suggested. Ranked. Fine for most things. Post-war steel builds a perfectly good bridge.

But if you ever want to know whether the machines changed what we laugh at, you need a baseline. What people thought was funny, when, how many of us, and whether we could tell who made it.

You can record that today.

You can't record it in ten years.

The AI companies would love that data. It would make their models better. And they can't have it, not because I'm hiding it, but because taking it means agreeing to the terms it was collected under. Ask first. Show the denominator. Give the value back to the people who made it.

They already have a way of finding out what you think. It's called watching everything you do. Their own machines will tell you this if you push. One of them put it in writing: no public consent process exists for the core architecture.

I'm not accusing anybody of anything. It said that, and nothing changed.

I'm doing it the other way. You get asked. You answer. It goes in the record with your name and the date.

The record is the point.

The jokes are the bait.

New photos show deep bruising on Trump's hand at Davos.

"He got the bruise by bitch slapping Lady Liberty in the face."

Is this funny?

Okay. Here's where I stop being nice.

You answered three questions. Here they are, in your own words.

All jokes in this piece are drawn from the News From The Jon archive.