HERE’S today’s question. How intelligent is artificial intelligence? Should we be worried that it is going to take over the world? Or at least mean students won’t write their own essays anymore? Can it answer our emails? And will it take our jobs?
And how long before AI is writing comedy?
Actually, it already is.
“I asked Chat GPT to write me a show,” Canadian musical comedian Anesti Danelis admits.
It’s a Saturday morning at the end of June and Canadian musical comedian Anesti Danelis is telling me that his new Edinburgh show, Artificially Intelligent, has been what you might describe as digitally doped.
Well, sort of. “I asked it to write a show and it was terrible,” he explains. “It gave me the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life. It reduced everything to stereotypes.”
In Artificially Intelligent, Danelis, who announced himself to the world online in 2019 when he uploaded himself resigning from his job in Starbucks via an original song entitled F**k This, I Quit, uses his interactions with ChatGPT to talk (and sing) about our online lives and how our digital experiences might be changing our very identity.
That said, he is not too worried that the Chatbot will be taking his job any time soon.
The reason, he says, he started using ChatGPT was pure curiosity. “I was like, ‘Maybe it will help me work smarter, not harder. There was no fear because I didn’t suspect it can take creative jobs. It has no life experience. So it’s impossible for it to even have a point of view; something that makes comedy good.”
He does admit, though, that ChatGPT has shaped his Edinburgh performance. “I gave it all the songs I wrote and asked it to write me a running order for the show. And it explained where each song should go and why. And then my director and I were like, ‘Oh, this kind of makes sense.’”
ChatGPT also plays a role in Isabella Charlton’s new show, So, My Dad F****d The Nanny.
As the title suggests, it’s primarily a comic memoir about family dysfunction. “A woman came up to me after a show and said you make my family seem normal,” Charlton admits over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles.
But at one point in her routine the comedian does talk about how she used ChatGPT to help her out on dating apps.
She would get the chatbot to write messages to her potential suitors because, she found, it was better at writing messages than she was. The results were more enthusiastic than anything she ever came up with.
“It takes the pressure off because someone else is writing the message,” Charlton explains. “You are dealing with so many people on dating apps and you don’t want to get emotionally invested in a bunch of strangers. I think it just helps.”
“My friends say I’m a sociopath, but it got me to a place where I got dates where they were excited to meet me and I didn’t have to fake anything!
“Also, it helped if a guy sent a message that was a bit off. I would ask ChatGPT to write a response. And it would write the perfect response, setting out boundaries in a way I would never have thought about.
“If I say to ChatGPT, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with this guy’s message, how do I reply?’ ChatGPT will give me a very measured response. Very thoughtful, very logical, perhaps more understandable to a guy’s brain.”
She even started dating one of the men that ChatGPT messaged, so it clearly worked. “We’ve been dating for a year or so.”
Charlton did eventually tell said boyfriend that he had been chatted up by a Chatbot.
“He’s terrified of AI now. I’m always joking that he’s going to fall in love with AI. I say, ‘You did. It’s already happened.’”
She can’t imagine letting AI start writing her punchlines, however. “I think as a pride thing I wouldn’t want ChatGPT to write my jokes. If you give it the right inputs it can be really funny. If you give it the wrong inputs you get dad jokes.”
An AI robot turning up at the Free Fringe with a routine about the good old days of the ZX Spectrum may be a while away (give it a year), but Charlton and Danelis both admit they think AI will transform our lives in the years to come.
But then, Danelis adds, we are already living in a digital world and it’s changing who we are.
“All of our lives are online now and I think it’s going to get worse. It helps make life easier, but I think it becomes an addiction too. We’re overstimulated every single day.
“I was listening to this podcast with this addiction doctor and he was saying we’re all just stimulated at multiple points of the day. Our brain doesn’t have time to process or come down from the stimulation that we are so susceptible to a lot of stuff.
“Which is why there are a lot of gambling apps that promote stuff late at night because you’ve been stimulated all day so you are more likely to be easily manipulated.
“It’s kind of making us dumb. So my whole argument is, are we who we are because we chose it, or are we who we are because an algorithm is suggesting content and lifestyle and we are just adopting these personality traits?”
In short, are you you or just what an algorithm is telling you? There’s probably a show in that. Oh wait, there already is.
Anesti Danelis: Artificially Intelligent, 21.15 Underbelly, Bristo Square, 2.15pm, until August 25 (except August 12)
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/anesti-danelis-artificially-intelligent
Isabella Charlton: So My Dad F****d The Nanny, 21.40 Gilded Balloon Patter House, 21.40, from July 31 to August 25 (except August 12)
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/isabella-charlton-so-my-dad-f-d-the-nanny
