LOL my AI cracked me up
AI Is Beating Us at Humor, Empathy, and Creativity. And that is amazing!
I know, I know. Last week, we were punching down on creativity and told you that the recent trend in AI is not about image, text, or others - but emotions and creativity. Now, AI is becoming funnier, more engaging, and more drama-lama.
And that says a lot. Any smartass human can recite academic papers. It requires basic intelligence, a hardened skin on our butts, and even more reading. But humor? It’s complex. It requires self-reflective intelligence, cultural versatility, and high emotional intelligence. Being funny is a very human thing.
Or, it was.
If AI can be as funny as most humans, it means three things:
AI can become not just a “tool” for teams to use for better productivity. It can become a proper “team member” who is an integrated part of the team.
AI can craft narratives and relatable ideas and is great at storytelling. All it takes is good instructions from you—like you would brief a human teammate.
Humans are still required as directors. You are the one who sparks and coins up the show. But it’s not you anymore who performs or runs it.
Harsh? Nah. Scifi? Not really. I bet this will be widespread by this year or next year.
AI Memes Better Than Humans
An AI just beat us at our own funny game.
In a new study, researchers pitted large language models against people in a “meme Turing test” – generating captions for popular meme images – and had online judges score them. The result? On average, AI-generated meme captions were rated more creative, humorous, and shareable than human-made ones. Even memes co-created by humans and AI scored lower than the AI-only memes. (Humans still produced some of the best captions, but too few to swing the averages.)
Given the proper training (in this case, OpenAI’s GPT-4o model), AI can master the art of internet humor – complete with timing, cultural references, and puns – well enough to make people prefer it over human witticisms.
If AI can win at humor, it can likely tackle other creative domains once thought exclusive to human talent. Marketers who rely on clever copy and viral memes might soon find AI to be a surprisingly adept brainstorming partner—or even competitor.
We’re already seeing brands use AI to generate social media posts; this study suggests those posts can be genuinely funny and engaging, not just boilerplate.
In the short term, creative teams can leverage AI for a first draft of ideas (taglines, ads, memes) and then add a human touch to the top contenders.
In the medium term, as AI humor and cultural savvy keep improving, marketers might orchestrate entire campaigns in which AI drafts dozens of edgy memes or jingles, and human creatives curate the best.
The takeaway
Don’t underestimate AI’s creative spark. It’s passing creativity tests, so savvy teams will use that to their advantage – freeing humans to focus on higher-level narrative and strategy while the bots riff and iterate on content.
