I’m Funnier than Artificial Intelligence. AI Just Told Me So

I have tried, since I first heard the term, to stay away from artificial intelligence.

The problem is, artificial intelligence won’t stay away from me.

If AI is not recommending an alternate restaurant to the one I was planning to dine at, it’s offering to rewrite my social media posts. It’s either trying to drive my car for me, or it wants to plan my next vacation. If it’s not suggesting a better title for my upcoming book, it’s using chatbots to locate my missing luggage. The latter failed incidentally.

Now AI thinks it’s funnier than I am.

Since 1989 I have been a full-time stand-up comedian. Making strangers laugh is difficult for sure but not nearly as tough as developing the material. I spend hours a day at my laptop creating, writing, deleting, and rewriting ideas that become jokes. My goal is to meld together a series of jokes into “bits,” so my act is not a series of random, disjointed one-liners, but a collection of stories about particular topics that I discuss via a seamless array of segues, giving audience members the perception that I’m just having a funny, 60-minute conversation with them.

And you thought comedians just slept until 3 p.m, worked an hour and spent the evening’s remainder trying to bang cocktail waitresses.

So imagine my dismay when, as I was typing a comment accompanying an Instagram photo, AI offered to take over. It could take that comment and…