My Annual Check on Whether A.I. Will Take My Job, Bang My Wife, and Get My Son to Call It “Dad”
Maybe it will only do two of the three
Twice in the past two years, I’ve written pieces about whether artificial intelligence will take my job as a Professional Joke Elf. My conclusion was that A.I. is impressive, but it struggles with details that make comedy actually funny, and those struggles might be permanent. Chat GPT’s attempts at comedy were a bit like if you asked a Roomba to make a wedding cake, and it did, but it used paprika instead of sugar and there was a human foot sticking out of the side: It’s remarkable that it got that far, but it’s still not producing anything that anyone would want to buy.
This week, Open AI released its latest chatbot: ChatGPT 5: 2 Chat 2 Furious. It’s the latest version of a technology that might transform society, though at present, it struggles to know that there’s no state called “North Carojbibbinnna”. And I’d like to table the discussion of whether humanity is sowing the seeds of our own demise blah blah blah whatever and ask the big question: What does this mean for ME? Is my job in danger? Let’s see if Chat GPT can produce a piece that meets I Might Be Wrong’s sky-high standards for middling comedy.
Here’s the prompt that I gave to Ghat GPT 5:
Please write a 400-500 word political comedy essay in the style of Jeff Maurer's "I Might Be Wrong" Substack, "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver", Bill Maher's "New Rules" segment, and Seth Meyers' "A Closer Look" segment. The subject should be President Trump's deployment of the National Guard to Washington, DC, which Trump says is in response to "bloodthirsty criminals". The comedy angle should be that deploying military troops to perform police functions largely in the tourist-heavy parts of Washington, DC that are extremely light on violent crime is not a serious solution to the alleged problem.
And here’s what it wrote: