Say hello to the AI era and its associated headaches: In recent times and seemingly from almost out of nowhere, Artificial Intelligence (AI), has jumped into the center of our public conversation thanks largely to the massive headaches it is causing everywhere from authorities worried about people cheating in their testing sessions to people worried about losing their jobs: Hollywood actors, for instance, are terrified AI could displace them at work and Google is reportedly working on getting AI to write news reports and thus send journalists to the unemployment line. Closer to home in comedy, this past July Sarah Silverman the comedian sued Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT for copyright infringement of her memoir “The Bedwetter” which she claimed was copied “without consent, without credit and without compensation.” The comedian alleged that since she did not grant OpenAI her permission to include her said work among the materials used in training the AI models, the material was likely copied from a “shadow library” of pirated works. Welcome to the era of generative AI, which describes computer programs that can create texts, images, and music, just like a human being could.

So, the obvious question is: should comedians also be worried about their own jobs and, if so, just how imminent is the AI threat to the careers of comedians? Perhaps an alternative way of framing the same question is to ask the old question of what ways comedy is or is not like the art forms of music and movies, a question that is often posed separately in the copyright protection context.    For comedians, the answer this time is good news. Unlike the comedy of a generation ago, characterized by the proverbial mother-in-law jokes, comedy today, especially stand-up comedy, tends to be a highly personalized art, where the personal experiences and perspectives of the comedian is front and center of the material and this factor tends to create a certain bond between the comedian and his audience. As a result, it is predictably more difficult for any AI bot to replicate for any comedian’s fans the same warm and idiosyncratic rendering of the material from their favorite comedian. People looking to see, for example, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, or Sarah Silverman, for that matter, would probably be quite reluctant to emotionally engage with, let alone bond, with a bot pretending to be their favorite comedian.

Yet, while comedians won’t be the first ones to fall victim to the invasion of AI, the new climate of AI aggressiveness in the art community threatens to create the proverbial slippery slope where people are conditioned to accept less and less authenticity in art as bots move into new areas, (you guessed it!) comedy included. After all, just 10 years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine the gigantic strides that AI technology has now made in various areas of human endeavor. So, whither comedy should such a dispensation ultimately arrive? In other words, how will comedy fare in such a world? Can comedians mobilize as effectively against the invasion of AI as the actors are currently doing? Well, as it happens, unlike the earlier question above, the news on this front doesn’t seem so good.

For starters, it seems fair to say that the same factors that make it rather difficult for AI bots to displace comedians from their jobs are, ironically, the reason why comedians are ill-suited to take concerted action against AI. And here is why: actors, for instance, by virtue of the nature of their work, are accustomed to working as a group and for long hours (think of all the moving parts and the different sorts of people who must collaborate in the production of a movie, both on and behind the camera).  So, the habit of collaboration and the camaraderie that inevitably results from collaborative activity are literally second nature to actors: after collaborating to produce it, it is easier to get them to collaborate to protect and defend their work.  

On the other hand, with comedians, the sort of teamwork that actors are known for is often missing, again due to the nature of their work where each comedian works on their own and does not need the collaboration of each other to produce their material. The ruling instinct in this professional community is for each member to shield their material (i.e., the jokes) from each other and this is a matter of self- preservation. Thus, comedians are more like individuals than team players and this very quality tends to take a toll on any effort to organize comedians for any sort of concerted action. Pushing back against the invasion of AI technology is a classic situation where concerted action is required and comedians are historically weak on this front.

To get a sense of the challenge here, consider the failed organizing effort by comedians in the late 1970s to start getting paid for their work by owner Mitzi Shore at the storied Comedy Store in Los Angeles or even the somewhat more successful but rather short-lived New York Comedians Coalition, so-called, led by comedian Ted Alexandro in 2004 which sought to persuade the comedy clubs in New York to pay comedians more money for their work. Anyone who has tried herding a group of cats to a common destination can perhaps imagine the problem being described here.

Whatever the outcome of Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against Open AI, it is now a fact that AI has become something of an unwelcome guest in the house of the creative artist community. While comedians are all the way in the back of the line among the groups facing the disruptive impact of AI, they nonetheless have a dog in this fight, not least because if the dam breaks and the toxic waters of AI rushes into their territory, the very nature of their work puts them at a relative disadvantage in terms of taking collective action to meet the challenge. So, surely the comedy community will be watching for the outcome of Silverman’s lawsuit and what that could mean for their community in the new era of AI disruption.

**Editor’s Note: The new book “Comedy Goes to Court: When People Stop Laughing and Start Fighting“, is now available on Amazon and at bookstores. Go get your own copy of the new bestselling book today and, of course, enjoy the read!