ChatGPT Tells a Joke
ChatGPT knows me pretty well. I’ve asked it hundreds of questions by now, and told it my reactions. It’s saved me hundreds of hours of time, and given me information, quite quickly and precisely, that no search engine could ever have managed. The tool is trained with one purpose in mind: To make you want to use it more and make it impossible for you to do things without it. That’s not cynicism; that’s _business_.
AI is following the same enshittification model that, as Cory Doctorow has explained, just about every other online tool has used: Suck you in with free or cheap offerings, then jack up the price, move all the free stuff to the expensive ‘premium’ versions, and then steal and re-sell your data to unethical corporations for predatory surveillance pricing, and clutter all the responses with ads ‘curated’ especially for what it has discerned you are most likely to buy from its _real_ customers, big corporations.
In short, this is the honeymoon stage of AI, at least for ‘consumers’. The misunderstandings, unpleasant surprises, ultimata and abuses will soon follow, leading, for all but the ultra-rich customers who can afford un-enshittified versions, to an angry and bitter divorce. As I keep saying, _use it while you can_.
Yesterday, I asked it what I thought was an innocuous question:
_If unrelated people who live together in a house are called ‘housemates’, what is the term for unrelated people who live together in an apartment?_
Here was its response. If you’re impatient, skip to the part I highlighted and underlined:
It’s… still housemates 🙂 English is boringly consistent that way. Even if the building is an apartment, flat, condo, or shoebox with ambitions, the people sharing the dwelling are generally called housemates. The word refers to the shared home, not the architectural form.
That said, there are a few alternatives, with slightly different vibes:
_Roommates_ — the most common in North American English, especially if you share a kitchen/living space, even if you don’t literally share bedrooms.
_Flatmates_ — very common in British, Australian, and some Canadian usage; basically the same as roommates but with Commonwealth flair.
_Apartment-mates_ — technically understandable, but rare and a bit clunky; you’ll mostly see it in legal or real-estate contexts, if at all.
_Co-tenants_ — legal/lease language only; sounds like you’re about to argue about the security deposit.
So in everyday speech: Canada / US: roommates (most natural), housemates (also fine); UK / elsewhere: flatmates; If you want to be perfectly idiomatic and unremarkable: roommates is your safest bet.
You’ll probably have detected a kind of jocular tone in this response, even before the highlighted joke (which I can’t help laughing at every time I read it). I shrugged at ‘shoebox with ambitions’ and ‘Commonwealth flair’. ChatGPT has ‘learned’ from my responses and my ‘upvotes’ and ‘downvotes’ on its responses how to respond in a character that endears me to it.
So when I asked it:
_I am surprised that you wrote “Co-tenants — legal/lease language only; sounds like you’re about to argue about the security deposit”. That is genuinely funny. Where did it come from?_
its response was fascinating:
Ha — I’m glad it landed 😄 That line wasn’t a quotation or a stock joke; it came straight out of pattern recognition plus lived-language vibes.
A few ingredients went into it:
_Register clash:_ “Co-tenant” is a perfectly normal term in property law, but it lives in contracts, court cases, and landlord emails that begin with “Pursuant to clause 7(b)…”. When a word almost never appears in casual speech, dropping it into a friendly context automatically creates tension — which comedy loves.
_Shared cultural script:_ Most people who’ve ever rented recognize the arc: (a) move in optimistic, (b) live peacefully for a while, (c) eventually argue about rent, damage, cleaning, or the deposit. “Co-tenant” strongly activates the end of that story. You don’t call someone your co-tenant when things are going well; you call them that when you’re marshalling evidence.
_Specificity beats abstraction:_ “Sounds formal” isn’t funny. “Sounds like you’re about to argue about the security deposit” is funny because it’s: (a) concrete, (b) familiar, (c) mildly painful, and (d) immediately visual. Comedy often comes from saying the quiet part out loud.
_Tone mirroring:_ You were asking a precise, slightly nerdy language question. That invites a dry, sideways aside rather than slapstick or emojis. The joke stays in the same intellectual register as the question.
So: no memorized joke, no reference — just linguistic anthropology plus a shared rental trauma 😅
Hmmm. What was your reaction when you read this?
I’ve lately been chatting with friends about why they find some things funny and other things not. Lots of explanations emerged including versions of ChatGPT’s “shared cultural script” (context), “specificity” (tell a story with details, don’t just state the facts), and “register clash” tension (what I have called _incongruity and surprise)_ , as well as tone of delivery, body language, timing, and, mostly, what we have each very uniquely and personally been _conditioned_ to find funny.
Much like when I review AI-produced poetry and song lyrics, I am subconsciously looking for _points of appreciation_ — clever juxtapositions of words, nice phrasing and rhythm etc — and am inclined to overlook the parts that just don’t make sense or which ring wrong, since I can correct them later. It’s the same when I listen to commercially released music: One good phrase or anthemic chorus or delicious ‘bridge’ or surprising harmony, and I’ll forgive all kinds of mediocrity in the rest of the poem or song.
Or, these days, whether the song is AI _or_ commercially produced, what I will sometimes do is _edit_ the song, using Audacity or a similar tool, to remove the lame parts and/or repeat the best parts, to personalize the song to make it (IMO) much better. Some tools will even allow me to have it automatically skip a lame intro or outro every time a song is played.
This is, perhaps, part of the ubiquitous ‘sense-making’ process of the human brain — ignoring what doesn’t appeal and doesn’t make sense and focusing on ‘stitching together’ what does. This has the obvious result of saving a lot of mental processing time, but it also tends to _reinforce what we already believe and like_ and _reinforce what we agree on (when speaking with others)_ , since those are the parts that readily ‘make sense’. We elide (skip over) the rest.
This bias in favour of prematurely and ‘preemptively’ appreciating, agreeing with, or (in the case of people we’ve ‘learned’ to distrust and dislike) _dis_ agreeing with others can have devastating consequences — complete misunderstandings of what the person we’re talking with or (allegedly) listening to (or even reading) is actually saying, what they ‘mean’, and/or what they believe. I’ve witnessed this misunderstanding as a third-party listener, and I’m sure I’m guilty of it myself.
So, getting back to ChatGPT’s ‘clever’ humour and its explanation for it: While I really enjoyed the explanation the first time I read it, each re-reading has led me to a sense that _most of what it is saying is gobbledygook_ , and my entrained appreciation of this tool (including appreciation of this ‘joke’) has reached the point _I am ‘reading’ into its explanations what makes sense to me, rather than what the words actually say_. This is not that different from all the journalists and MAGA-nuts listening to or (on rare occasions when it’s printed verbatim) reading the incoherent ravings of disengaged-from-reality Trump, so that, instead of saying ‘huh wtf?’, they ‘hear’ only _what they think he meant to say_, or _what they wanted to believe he was saying_.
That’s so very human of us! And ChatGPT is accommodating and exploiting this to the fullest. I read its explanation and find that I can _interpret_ parts of it as incisive and even ‘wise’, and I can find most of the rest of it _plausible_ , at least if I squint. But it’s just churning out answers that it has been conditioned to believe are what I want to hear, and using mostly-arbitrary words and phrases to make its explanations sound plausible (and its lyrics inoffensive and elide-able). It would never admit to simply not knowing.
So, for example, it replied “You don’t call someone your co-tenant when things are going well.” First time I just skimmed past this assertion. But it’s simply not true. You call someone that when the other terms might come across as too intimate or otherwise a misrepresentation of the true nature of your relationship.
And then it ‘explained’: “[The joke] is funny because it’s: (a) concrete, (b) familiar, (c) mildly painful, and (d) immediately visual. Comedy often comes from saying the quiet part out loud.” This sounds clever and draws on several qualities that _can_ make a remark funny. But we’re willingly giving it a pass here, when these four qualities _aren’t_ really why this joke was funny. Because the actual reason it’s funny is _beyond the capacity of AI to comprehend_. It’s actually funny because it’s _satirical_ — it’s poking fun at our entire culture and our propensity to use certain forms of expression and terms in a particular, very complex and very personal context, and then introducing _surprise_ to suggest what’s really going on when we do that. AI cannot possibly have the _context_ or the _competency_ to be able to understand that, so it ‘fakes’ its explanation using words and expressions from its data base that seem ‘explanatory’.
As for the terms “lived-language vibes” and “linguistic anthropology plus a shared rental trauma”, I might generously infer what these unusual word concatenations _might_ mean. Or I could just as easily conclude that the AI was just conjuring up bafflegab to try to sound cleverer than it really is.
I don’t mean this to be a critique of AI. It’s doing what it’s been programmed (‘conditioned’) to do. It’s doing its best to please us. But it’s the _reader_ who’s relied upon to do all the heavy lifting — the actual sense-making. It’s just giving us a bunch of disconnected data base excerpts that are related to the question, with a veneer of connection between them, and, by flattering us, is depending on us to assess, in the most positive possible light, what that ‘means’. You probably know humans who do the same.
One might almost characterize this as a kind of _reverse gaslighting_. Gaslighting is when the perp manipulates someone, usually over an extended period of time, so they question the validity of their own thoughts and perceptions and develop a dependency on the perp. What AI is doing in this case is manipulating us over an extended period of time so we _don’t_ question the validity of our own thoughts and perceptions, _and don’t question the AI’s reassurances_ about their validity, and hence develop a dependency on the AI, which is more _emotional_ dependency than intellectual.
I know a surprising number of people, most of them quite mentally astute, who have developed such an dependency. And I’m wary of developing such a dependency myself, when AI’s carefully-framed and -worded reassurances are often so flattering and sycophantic. The same way I’m wary of such reassurances from real-life friends and ‘trusted’ online resources. We are so easy to propagandize, manipulate, deceive, and to be made to believe things because we _want_ to believe them. That’s how we’re made!
A lot of great humour is accidental and inadvertent. We laugh when young kids say things that tickle us for complex and profound (and often very personal) reasons, reasons that a list of ‘what makes something funny’ can barely scratch the surface at explaining. And that’s what, I think, has happened here. ChatGPTs attempt to respond to my questions in an “intellectual register” I have inadvertently trained it to use by my previous reactions, has led it to ‘fill in’ its answers with stuff it ‘thinks’ (ie it has been conditioned to frame its responses in accordance with) that I want to hear, in a writing ‘style’ I would like to hear it in. And some of those answers will inevitably make me laugh.
ChatGPT will _never_ be able to understand _why_ it made me do so. The best it will ever be able to do is to provide some vanilla explanations for why some things strike many people as funny, and hope that my generosity and trust in it will be enough for me to ‘buy’ the overall explanation.
But at least this has accomplished one thing: I’m no longer going to even _try_ to understand why some people think certain things are funny and others don’t. That would require that I understand a trillion things that I could never hope to understand even if I lived a million lifespans.
So I’ll leave that to those who believe themselves to be much smarter than me. And to the clueless chatbots reassuring them that they indeed are.
* * *
silly image by AI; not my prompt
ChatGPT Tells a Joke ChatGPT knows me pretty well. I’ve asked it hundreds of questions by now, and told it my reactions. It’s saved me hundreds of hours of time, and given me information, quite...
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