Study claims AI is funnier than humans after people rate jokes written by both

Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr will be sweating in their mansions after a new study has suggested that AI is actually funnier than humans.

That human-touch used to perfectly tell a joke might be a thing of the past as we barely interact with each other as it is.

Most of us get our daily chuckle from memes on Instagram reels and we don't even need a real person to tell us a real joke anymore.

AI looks to be taking over. (Getty Stock Images)

That being said, if ChatGPT is able to craft jokes better than humans, then it could cause a 'serious employment threat' to comedians world-wide.

It all started when researchers from the University of Southern California, US, decided to put AI up against humans in two separate comedy challenges.

The first challenge was given to 105 humans who were asked to provide their funniest responses to a number of tasks.

Those people were asked to muster up a funny reading of what the acronyms 'S.T.D.', 'C.L.A.P.' and 'C.O.W' could mean.

Next, they were tasked with a 'fill in the blank' challenge, followed by a 'roast', which is insulting someone based on an imagined situation.

You might be laughing at a robot on stage in a few years. (Getty Stock Images)

One of the prompts read: "Imagine that one of your friends wants your opinion on how well she sings.

"She sings a minute or two to demonstrate her voice, and you cringe — she might be the worst singer you ever heard.

"When she asks, 'So how was it?' you decide to be honest so you say, 'To be honest, listening to that was like: _____."

The researchers after put the human responses up against ChatGPT, which generated 20 of its own responses to each of the tasks. The jokes were rated on a seven-point scale from zero, not funny at all, to six, very funny.

And the results are shocking as 200 human judges concluded that ChatGPT's responses were a lot funnier than those crafted by humans, 69.5 percent of the time.

It turns out that AI outperformed humans by 87 percent in the 'roast task' and 73 percent in the acronym task.

Ricky, don't worry mate, you had a good run. (Mike Marsland/WireImage)

Lead researcher Drew Gorenz, of the University of Southern California, said: "Since ChatGPT can't feel emotions itself but it tells novel jokes better than the average human, these studies provide evidence that you don't need to feel the emotions of appreciating a good joke to tell a really good one yourself."

Now, to make it a fairer test, researchers also matched ChatGPT up against jokes from real comedians - and the results were not as embarrassing.

217 judges were given satirical headlines from The Onion to compare with ChatGPT's attempt.

Sadly, only 48.8 percent of human judges thought The Onion's headlines were funnier that AI.

I mean, the thought of R2-D2 spitting jokes up on stage is pretty funny I guess.